Categories
Photography Technology

Image Magic

I’ve been experimenting around with software tools and utilities, and for this batch I used ImageMagick’s command line tools to create the thumbnails and add a signature.

The shell script to add the signature is:

#!/bin/sh
for name in *jpg
do
echo $name
convert $name -font AvantGuarde-Demi -pointsize 24 \
-gravity SouthEast \
-fill maroon -draw "text 27,27 'Shelley'" \
-fill white -draw "text 25,25 'Shelley'" \
$name
done

Puts a signature on every JPEG in a subdirectory.

I also found a lovely little online photo editor that does everything most people need, and has one of the few truly intuitive interfaces I’ve seen among these tools. It’s called Picnik and it doesn’t cost anything to give it a try, as far as I can see.

I won’t use the WordPress upload software, nor the software I had been developing. These require the ability to have global write to a directory, and this has been hacked now and I don’t consider it safe. Instead, I FTP images to a working directory, run my ImageMagick scripts to do my global changes, and then push them over to the my photos subdirectory. All in all, it’s actually as fast or more than uploading one photo at a time, though it doesn’t ‘hide’ you from the environment as much.

I think that’s a mistake myself: protecting the users from the environment. All we’ve done is help them/you to open their/your environment to hacking. Not particularly responsible of us.

Daylily
Gardens
Rose