download galleries for use on a CD (with captions)

rainforest1155 · March 31, 2006

Greg had a great idea over here:

wellman wrote:

Speaking of that, how about a new smugmug service that takes a gallery (or galleries) with their captions and transfers them to DVD? Might be nice for gifts to Grannies without PC (or Macs).

Actually he wanted to download his site to burn it on a CD, but that didn't went well with the tool he tried. I guess the connection to SM is really important for the site content and it can't be downloaded properly.

Nik? You recently implemented the picture download. You think downloading the captions + perhaps the keywords would work too?
Luke? Or anyone else in the coding business - any thoughts on this?

Maybe we wouldn't even need a program to display the content - perhaps it's possible to create new html-files so it should be pretty much platform independent.

I would like to see the standard browse mode for galleries and additionally a slideshow mode for presentation only.

Let's see what you guys come up with!

Sebastian

Nikolai · March 31, 2006

Sebastian,

rainforest1155 wrote:

Greg had a great idea over here:

Actually he wanted to download his site to burn it on a CD, but that didn't went well with the tool he tried. I guess the connection to SM is really important for the site content and it can't be downloaded properly.

Nik? You recently implemented the picture download. You think downloading the captions + perhaps the keywords would work too?
Luke? Or anyone else in the coding business - any thoughts on this?

Maybe we wouldn't even need a program to display the content - perhaps it's possible to create new html-files so it should be pretty much platform independent.

I would like to see the standard browse mode for galleries and additionally a slideshow mode for presentation only.

Let's see what you guys come up with!
Sebastian

Star*Explorer can already handle this, at least to a some degree. When downloading, you can select the file name being the caption. Of course, if you happen to have several images in one gallery all named "Jenny" you'd be in trouble, but you always can have your template set to %CAPTION%_%FILENAME% (or something else to guarantee uniqueness).
Also, all the "invalid" characters in captions (you can't have file name containing *, ?, etc) will be replaced with the whitespace.
S*E would not burn the DVD for you, but there are other apps for that (Nero, Sonic, Windows Explorer, etc)..:D

rainforest1155 · April 1, 2006

Nikolai wrote:

Star*Explorer can already handle this, at least to a some degree. When downloading, you can select the file name being the caption.

Forgot that you already could put the caption in the filename. But that's somewhat troublesome if you've got extensive captions. I also got html-tags in the captions which simply make no sense in the filename. It looks like S*E doesn't check if the resulting filename is valid - in my test only 13 of the 31 images were actually written on the disc.

Still leaves the problem that there's no user interface and that you've to browse the photos by hand. Maybe someone else has a solution.

Thanks,
Sebastian

Nikolai · April 1, 2006

Sebastian,

rainforest1155 wrote:

Forgot that you already could put the caption in the filename. But that's somewhat troublesome if you've got extensive captions. I also got html-tags in the captions which simply make no sense in the filename. It looks like S*E doesn't check if the resulting filename is valid - in my test only 13 of the 31 images were actually written on the disc.

Still leaves the problem that there's no user interface and that you've to browse the photos by hand. Maybe someone else has a solution.

Thanks,
Sebastian

Let me ask you: if you have multilined caption with all sorts of HTML stuff in them, WHAT would you expect the filename to be?

As to the UI - well, let me ask you: how often would you use it? If you need just a picture or two, browser's "Save Picture As..." would work wonders. If you want the whole gallery/category/all - S*E can help. So - why would one need a special UI?

rainforest1155 · April 1, 2006

Nikolai wrote:

Let me ask you: if you have multilined caption with all sorts of HTML stuff in them, WHAT would you expect the filename to be?

As to the UI - well, let me ask you: how often would you use it? If you need just a picture or two, browser's "Save Picture As..." would work wonders. If you want the whole gallery/category/all - S*E can help. So - why would one need a special UI?

The idea behind all this was to burn a CD to give to someone containing selected galleries with some kind of browsing interface (that what I was referring to with my UI request - an interface that would allow browsing from CD).
So this tool should ideally be capable of either:
- creating a new offline html-site of the galleries with captions that everyone can view using their browser without having to be connected to the net.
- or displaying the galleries from within a separate program with captions which should probably availiable for a wide range of OS (PC, Linux, Mac)

I guess the first possibility would be more do-able, because customizing a html-template leaves more space for individual solutions.

So far for the general idea. Now to your thoughts concerning solutions in S*E:
It won't be possible to develop the caption-to-filename-feature that it works for everyone. Maybe you could provide the possibility to use regular expressions so that we can filter the caption on our own. Also would be great to be able to save a few reg-ex templates for later use.

The most important thing is that whatever the user enters that S*E should check the lenght of the filename in the end and truncate if it exceeds the 255 char limit so that the file would get written after all.
It also would be nice if you could offer an option to create a unique filename by automaticly adding a counter for files with the same name. That would ensure that if the user set a bad filename scheme that none the less all files would end up on the harddrive.

Hope this clears things up a bit,
Sebastian

Nikolai · April 1, 2006

UI, S*E, etc.:-)

rainforest1155 wrote:

The idea behind all this was to burn a CD to give to someone containing selected galleries with some kind of browsing interface (that what I was referring to with my UI request - an interface that would allow browsing from CD).
So this tool should ideally be capable of either:
- creating a new offline html-site of the galleries with captions that everyone can view using their browser without having to be connected to the net.
- or displaying the galleries from within a separate program with captions which should probably availiable for a wide range of OS (PC, Linux, Mac)

I guess the first possibility would be more do-able, because customizing a html-template leaves more space for individual solutions.

Oh, *that* UI. For offline galleries.. Hmm. Not sure if it's as easy as it sounds. SM's heavy usage of CSS would require saving and processing all that information... Looks like a lot of work, and for whom? For offline people? They probably don't have a computer either. And speaking of grandmas, it's much easier and simpler to put the small pics into any decent mp3 player with photo capabilities, hook it up to a TV (they DO have a TV:-), and show it this way...
At this point I'm not sold. Very narrow application, very large amount of work. Cost-prohibitive.

rainforest1155 wrote:

So far for the general idea. Now to your thoughts concerning solutions in S*E:
It won't be possible to develop the caption-to-filename-feature that it works for everyone. Maybe you could provide the possibility to use regular expressions so that we can filter the caption on our own. Also would be great to be able to save a few reg-ex templates for later use.

The most important thing is that whatever the user enters that S*E should check the lenght of the filename in the end and truncate if it exceeds the 255 char limit so that the file would get written after all.
It also would be nice if you could offer an option to create a unique filename by automaticly adding a counter for files with the same name. That would ensure that if the user set a bad filename scheme that none the less all files would end up on the harddrive.

As I mentioned in my email to you, those are valid concerns/suggestions, I will work on them.

rainforest1155 wrote:

Hope this clears things up a bit,
Sebastian

You bet:-)! Thanks a lot!

Cheers!

luke_church · April 1, 2006

I'm a little busy right now so I've only scan read the thread, but yes, I definately have something in the works for this.

Personally I think that saving meta-data in the file name is a really daft thing to do. I can just think of an almost endless list of ways it'll break, some of which would be pretty annoying. I use line breaks, '?'s, '\'s in my meta-data?!? You're trying to solve a huge problem one case at a time, and in the process you're creating a huge usability problem.

I'm working on an application that does download/upload, that saves the comments in a Meta-Data cache file. ([sarcasm]Oh yeah, desinging one of those is so much fun...[/sarcasm])

The application can also display files and their meta-data.

I expect to release the first variant talking to a propietary format, as I need to support fail-stop recovery, however, after that I'm evaluating XMP, which would also give compatibility with Photoshop, Bridge. Building pipelines to any application that bothers to document their meta-data formats should be too hard.

So yes, we can do it, and do it properly without the daft problems you end up with if you start sticking meta-data in file names. Most of the software core is designed and about 50% developed. It's all a matter of time.

It's all about the MetaData

Luke

luke_church · April 1, 2006

rainforest1155 wrote:

Actually he wanted to download his site to burn it on a CD, but that didn't went well with the tool he tried. I guess the connection to SM is really important for the site content and it can't be downloaded properly.

Yeah, that isn't going to work. Smugmug's website isn't a s simple 'static HTML' job.

Nik? You recently implemented the picture download. You think downloading the captions + perhaps the keywords would work too?

OK, So I've replied to that, I think.

Maybe we wouldn't even need a program to display the content - perhaps it's possible to create new html-files so it should be pretty much platform independent.

In a simplistic manner, yes. In a manner as sophesticated as Smugmug, then sure it's possible, but:

- It's too much work for me, and it's HTML+CSS which I don't enjoy

- We would need Smugmug's permission, esp. if it looked like their UI, copyright enfringement problems loom...

>I would like to see the standard browse mode for galleries and additionally a slideshow mode for presentation only.

You can have a screen-saver as I have almost all the code base written, other than image fading which isn't wanting to play. Would you be content with a 3rd party application as a viewer?

Picasa can do this kind of thing I think? It would then be a question of get the data into Picasa and let them do the huge ammount of UI work :-)

Hope this helps,

Luke

Nikolai · April 1, 2006

A little comment on metadata

luke_church wrote:

I'm working on an application that does download/upload, that saves the comments in a Meta-Data cache file. ([sarcasm]Oh yeah, desinging one of those is so much fun...[/sarcasm])

I'm not sure which metadata exactly we're talking about, but just to be clear: S*E features Image Info Download (which can launched separately; it's also executed as a part of Image Download), where all the image data available from SM is downloaded and stored in a local MDB (MS Access) file, with all the proper links to the rest of the cached data (category, gallery, and such).
Since it's a simple ADO compliant database, from there it's possible to take the process wherever you want:-)
Just my .000000002...

luke_church · April 1, 2006

Nikolai wrote:

Since it's a simple ADO compliant database, from there it's possible to take the process wherever you want:-)
Just my .000000002...

Sure, so if you have captions, keywords etc. in a database then the problem is the thing that neither of us want to do, which is write some either gallery generator or other form of UI...

OK, I'll wait for feedback on whether 3rd part solutions are viable.

Cheers Nik,

Luke

PS. You may wish to find a new currency, you're going to run into floating point problems pretty quickly at this rate

:

Nikolai · April 1, 2006

Luke,

luke_church wrote:

Sure, so if you have captions, keywords etc. in a database then the problem is the thing that neither of us want to do, which is write some either gallery generator or other form of UI...

Exactly so, my friend, exactly so!

luke_church wrote:

PS. You may wish to find a new currency, you're going to run into floating point problems pretty quickly at this rate :

lol

Cheers!

zanthrus · April 7, 2006

Xslt
XSLT is fantastic for this kind of thing. If you have a single XML file with all the data about a users galleries and photos, then you can build an almost unlimited number of html pages with a single XSLT stylesheet.

I've used Saxon (http://saxon.sourceforge.net/) to build a website this way. If you look through the documentation, you'll see a cool example where a html version of the bible with over 200 pages is built from one XML and one XSLT file.

I plan to attempt to do something similar for my Smugmug site this summer. The only difficulty is building multi-keyword pages. I'm sure its still possible, its just some complicated XSLT to try every possible keyword combination.

LeDude · April 7, 2006

Adobe Acrobat Web Capture
i believe this may be a solution (haven't tested it), but is more in line with the original request, i.e. producing a copy of the website for offline viewers in papua new guniea (or wherever)

Adobe Acrobat Web Capture... at least, ver. 5.0 had this capability and I can't imagine they deleted it... all passwords and photo protection would probably need to be off and I'm not sure, even then, if it would handle pictures well... but hey, it's a shot no?

is this a completely assinine post? i'm in a rush, sorry if it's way off base

Rich

download galleries for use on a CD (with captions)

Comments