It looks simple, doesn't it? And indeed it would be...if I haven't somehow managed to take over 20,000 photos in the past few years!

I can stop anytime I want...

ARTICLE: About Our Photos
by John-Paul, ATF Staff Writer

It all started with...

In 1995 I was brand new to the world wide web. Actually, I'd been using it for awhile but in text form only. I didn't even know it could have pictures! Of course, neither did most people at that time since the web was still in diapers. Netscape 2 was going to be the best thing ever and Microsoft still didn't realize the internet was going to be important...

When I bought my first digital camera in 1996 it was mainly used for putting pictures of Disneyland up on my GeoWorld home page. (That's "Yahoo! GeoCities" for the net newbies out there.) In those days I had to explain what my gadget was. "It's a computer camera," I'd say, since no one knew what a digital camera was. Times have really changed, but that original Epson Photo PC camera served as my primary soul capturing device up until fall of 2000 when it was replaced by a state of the art megapixel wonder from Sony. Today, Mistress Willa often takes the old Epson with her for backup shots.

My point? My point is that back then the web was small and putting together a photo album of vacation pictures was no big effort. My camera had only one megabyte of flash memory which meant only a handful of photos could be taken each trip. Today, my camera has 64 times as much memory and I even have extra memory for storing even more. During a recent vacation to Disney's California Adventure I took over 1000 photos in a single day. Obsessive? Perhaps, but it all goes back to my early days on the web when I'd read all this great text about new multimillion dollar theme park attractions but couldn't find a decent picture to actually see what it looked like. My original goal was simply to provide a way for folks to see what the big deal was and today I have over 20,000 ways. If a picture is worth a thousand words, that's enough words to fill up an encyclopedia set.

Why don't you give your pictures descriptive file names?

At the end of each festival day I try to find the time to hook my camera up to my laptop and download all of the images. The images from my Sony come out named "DSC#####.JPG" where "#####" is a number that increments for each picture. This doesn't help me remember when I took the picture so I drag my folder of images over to a utility called Cameraid. This program lets me perform lossless rotation on any images where the camera was held sideways. This is important to me since I don't want to lose any image quality or internal timestamp information contained in the file. Cameraid also can perform batch operations on the gallery. I use this to rename the files to something more reasonable. I currently use the format of "MMDDYY_###.jpg" where MM is the month, DD is the day, and YY is the year. The Epson used the format "MMDD_###.jpg" so as years progressed I found out I would sometimes have duplicate files names. ("Was this taken at the Iowa fest in September 1999 or 1997?")

When I first got started taking pictures, PCs were limited to filenames of only 8 characters. For years I kept this limit so even those using older PCs could download my pictures without having to rename them. I even wrote a set of custom DOS programs to handle batch renaming (and to work around a nasty Windows 95 long filename bug I discovered), but today Cameraid works much better. Today I feel less inclined to preserve the ancient 1981 DOS file system limitation so I can extend the timestamp a bit.

I could use a naming system such as "WybregVillageFall_MMDDYY_###.jpg" which would be easier to identify but I think the date timestamp works for now. If you have other opinions, I'd love to hear them. I probably won't ever go back and rename the previous 20,000 pictures but I might change the naming convention used by future additions to the gallery.

Why does it take you so long to get new pictures added?

Another question that pops up is "when will the pictures from insert recent festival here be up?" To answer this I must explain what happens with the photos next. When my photos were first made available online none of the web services I used offered more than a few megs of space. I stored all the photos on my laptop PC hard drive and operated a file server which was only available when I was logged in to the internet. I had a web page that showed if I was online or not and then redirected visitors direct to my computer. This seemed to work and back then I'd have the pictures up the same day I took them. (Ah, the days of posting "live" nightly updates from my vacations to Disneyland...)

As more and more people started to download from my site (making it really slow) I decided to move it to a full time web host. I found one affordable host that had no storage or bandwidth restrictions. Simplenet ("Yahoo! Web Hosting" for the net newbies out there) was $8.25 a month and only had one problem: every file had to be visibly linked from somewhere on the web site. I could no longer just dump the files in a folder and let people explore them. I found a simple text indexing utility for the PC that would create HTML pages listing the contents of directories. This made processing pictures take a bit more time than previously, but it wasn't that big of a deal.

As the archive grew, so did the amount of e-mail I received asking if I could make finding pictures easier. I searched and searched for a program that would generate thumbnail images linked to the full size photo. Nothing seemed to handle a large volume of photos in a graceful manner. Most either tried to lump all the pictures in one directory (making a massive index of thumbnails) or required you to process each folder one at a time. Quite a few just crashed when faced with thousands of photos! I'm sure these programs are great for putting up an index of photos from Billy's 10th Birthday, but no one took 20,000 pictures in Billy's backyard. Besides, I simply don't have that kind of time. (Many folks think I've got way too much time on my hands as it is but trust me -- I try to automate things so it takes as little effort as possible!)

PowerNailer finally came to my rescue! While it still could only process one folder at a time, it allowed you to feed it a batch file listing multiple folders to process. Using a directory listing (the output of "DIR /S/B" redirected into a text file from DOS), the PowerNailer program, and HFI I was able to kludge together my first thumbnail directories. Even on my (then) high speed 233MHz Pentium machine generating pages for hundreds of files took quite some time. If there was a mistake, or (more likely) Windows crashed halfway through, I had to start all over! Instead of having photos up within hours of getting back home it would usually take a few days. The longest delays were usually due to me just not having enough spare hours to waste sitting in front of my computer generating HTML pages ;-)

To make the thumbnail pages a bit easier to navigate, I recently learned enough Java to write a filter program that would insert little "Prev [1] [2] [3] Next" links on each preview page (allowing the viewer to quickly move from page to page without having to go back to the main index and do this manually). Kludgy, but it worked. Again, this added more time to the whole process.

Today things are technically much easier. I am currently experimenting with a new program called PhotoToWeb. This accidental discovery is almost perfect for what I need. First, it works automatically after you set up a few preferences and feed it a list of folders to process. Second, it handles as many photos as you can throw at it (seemingly) and creates massive amounts of HTML pages all interlinked. Sadly, over the past few months of testing I've had to report several major bugs which kept it from being useful. The first flaw was that it did not always generate all the pages. I can generate enough broken links on my own without the assistance of a $99 shareware program ;-) The other bug (which has only recently been figured out) was that it would sometimes spit out images at 25% of their desired size. Because of these issues I have not been able to convert the AtTheFaire photo archives over. (Oh, I can still crash it by dragging one of my folders over it, but that's just because I've exceeded the amount of folders my OS can apparently handle in a drag and drop operation! Ever open a folder so big Windows can't display all the files in it and gives you a strange warning about that? I've seen that many, many times!)

So when will we see this at AtTheFaire?

The author of PhotoToWeb has fixed the last of the main bugs and is working on some extra features to work around the remaining big one. Hopefully I will soon be able to create an all-new index of the renaissance festival photos just by starting at the top folder and clicking "Build Web Pages". It stills takes hours to generate the pages, but at least I don't have to manually do every step! There is still the problem of updating the site -- PhotoToWeb was not designed to "add on" to an existing album so each time a new faire is added I will need to regenerate the entire site to maintain the sitewide links. Maybe by the summer of 2001 the photos will be back in an all new form that will be easier to navigate than ever before. To see a preview of how the system works, check out my other photo galleries at DisneyFans.com.

Keep in mind, there will still be alot of work to do manually. Pictures must be rotated, renamed, and then sorted into folders by category ("Joust", "Roses", "Men In Kilts", etc.) Thankfully, Mistress Willa makes a great photo organizer! If it weren't for her and PhotoToWeb, I'd say my galleries wouldn't have much of a future!

Now, if I can find an easy way to index all the MPEG video clips we want to put online I'd really be happy...

-- John-Paul

Tech Notes:

Then:

• Camera: Epson PhotoPC (5MB flash, 320x240 to 640x480 resolution)
• Computer: Toshiba 75Mhz 486, Compaq 166Mhz Pentium, Toshiba 233Mhz Pentium
• Software: HFI.EXE, DIR, custom DOS and Java utilities, PowerNailer for Windows

Today/Near Future:

• Camera: Sony DSC-70 (64MB flash, 640x480 to 1600x768 resolution)
• Computer: iMac, iMac DV/SE, PowerBook G4 (Titanium)
• Software: Cameraid, PhotoToWeb (Mac OS X), GraphicsConverter, Fireworks 3

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