Mark Rages wrote:
> I assume this is for some embedded webserver application.

It's actually for purely personal HTML pages to fix a purely personal peeve.
I really dislike using the mouse, probably because I can type very well and
moving my fingers from the keyboard where they belong really breaks the
flow, requires concious thought whereas typing doesn't, and feels really
slow - in short it's annoying.

I'm an amateur photographer (although I've made a few $K on photography in
my life, I've never made a living at it nor tried to).  I've always felt
that taking pictures without keeping records of the particulars of the
pictures was pretty useless.  Also unless you can easily access and search
the recorded information it's pretty useless too.  I guess the desire to
keep good records of photographs comes from the same anal-compulsive drive
that causes one to write good comments in computer code.

I used to keep a page describing the pictures of a film with the proof sheet
of the film in three ring binders.  Then along came HTML and digital
photography.  Now I have a standard directory structure for each film.  This
contains the original images as scanned in one subdirectory, and other
subdirectories for various resized versions of each image.  I keep copies
that are maximized to fit within 60 x 60, 200 x 200, 600 x 600, and 1024 x
1024, plus a directory for derived images (like cropped, etc).  I've also
defined a machine readable picture documentation (.pdoc) file format.  For
now I enter this with a text editor, but it was designed to allow for GUI
programs to write it without too much trouble.  I have a program that takes
the pdoc file and the original images and creates everything else.  It also
creates a HTML page for each frame of the film with all the description
information for that frame, plus a proof sheet HTML page for the whole film.
Each of the individual frame pages has a link to go to the previous and next
frame in the film.  Often it's nice to look thru a film sequentially, and
I'd like to go to next or previous with a single keystroke if possible.

I was adding to the software today, so I thought I'd ask about one of the
things that had been bugging me but I didn't know how to fix.  Occasionally
I want to release a collection of pictures to someone, and so far I've had
to do that all manually.  Today I sat down to write the program to automate
this.  I create a list of film/frame names, and the program automatically
builds a release directory, copies the various image files, renames them to
make them globally unique instead of just within the film, looks up the info
about each frame, and builds the linked list of HTML pages for the frames
and an overview thumbnails page.  I realize now that there isn't a simple
HTML answer like I thought for single key forward/back, so this isn't going
to get done today.  I will save the responses I got and look into JavaScript
more in depth at a later time.

What prompted all this is that a naturalist ranger at Bryce Canyon National
Park asked to use one of my pictures in a presentation he's developing for
this summer.  Instead of building a release of pictures once again manually,
I'm finally sitting down to write this program I've been thinking about for
a long time.  This program is going to get as far as it gets today because
I'm going to send him a CD on Monday and I've still got to scan a few slides
and write the associated documentation.

You're probably sorry you asked by now.  By the way, I'm willing to make
these tools freely available to others that are anal about documenting their
pictures too.  What surprises me is that there isn't anything like this out
there, or at least wasn't a bunch of years ago when I first started doing
this.  There must be *somebody* else that cares about documenting their
pictures.


******************************************************************
Embed Inc, Littleton Massachusetts, (978) 742-9014.  #1 PIC
consultant in 2004 program year.  http://www.embedinc.com/products
-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist