Cavalcade of Mammals

I scanned in a bunch of family photos, fixed them up, added captions, and posted them on Google’s Picasa Web Album.

I used a flatbed scanner and filled it with photos each scan. This necessitated splitting and cropping each scan into separate images. To speed this along I wrote an AppleScript to call Photoshop’s “Crop and Straighten Photos” function and then save the images.

split_img Applescript

The script worked pretty well for about half the images. I went through and cropped/straightened each image. Then I automatically ran Auto Levels and Auto Contrast or Auto Colors on each image using a second Applescript.

adjust_img Applescript

I wanted to add captions and tags to each image using a list of captions I made when I scanned the photos. Jpg images can store this meta data in the file using the IPTC standard. Unfortunately, Google’s Picasa uploading applications terribly buggy and don’t work well with IPTC tags added by other programs like iPhoto or EXIFutils. So I couldn’t use Google’s Picasa software or plugins to upload the photos.

Google makes an API for interacting with their web sites available, and there is a Perl module, Net::Google::PicasaWeb, available that allows adding captions and tags when uploading pictures. Testing showed that it worked so I wrote a small Perl program to take a tab-delimited text file of images, the target album, the caption, and any tags and load the photos onto the Picasa Web Album site. I needed to use the most up to date version of Net::Google::PicasaWeb and make a one line change.

picasa_upload Perl program

My Picasa Web Album:

Old family photos (Jan. 2009)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 10:08 pm and is filed under linux, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.