Project Ault Park Sunrise helper scripts
Blaine Booher
http://aultparksunrise.com

This script helps me post lots of daily pictures to my free wordpress.com
blog (Ault Park Sunrise). It processes the pictures *and* prints out html
so that I don't have to spend the torturous amount of time individually
adding each image to my post, one at a time.

Consider this script at a pre-alpha version. No warranty is expressed,
and you'll likely have to dig into the files to edit them to your liking.

Introduction
------------

I started a bike / photo / history / local culture / health blog with the 
intent of seeing and documenting 40 sunrises in the hills of Eastern
Cincinnati. To help me with the processing of the pictures, I needed
a tool. This script is that tool.

I'll add more to this as I get the git repo up and running.  For now, 
know that this script is limited but it fits my needs quite well. You'll
have to open view.py (main file loader) and annotate.py (gtk window) to 
make sure that the settings work for you if you want to use this script.

My Workflow
-----------
My workflow is simple and with this script I am able to take lots of 
pictures each day of the sunrise and surrounding Cincinnati urban landscape
without taking much time. Before I wrote this script i was averaging about
90 seconds, on average, per image. That meant 30 images took way too long 
to process and there was an incentive for me to "keep it short".

With this script the amount of time depends only on how much I write for 
each picture, not how long it takes to process each one. I can focus on
the writing, not the cruft. About 5 seconds per image of processing, on average.

My routine:
0) Make a thermos full of delicious french press coffee at 10pm on previous night
1) Wake up at 6am and bike to Ault Park. Take pictures, as many as I want
2) Plug camera into computer, dump pictures to my /sunrise/queued folder
3) Back up all pictures to /backup/pictures
4) Hand pick which pictures I want to use. Put them in /sunrise/Day40/
5) run "python view.py /sunrise/Day40/*.jpg"
6) Select names for each picture
7) Copy the html output into the html box on wordpress
8) Click "Upload Images" and select all of the renamed images
9) Write up the daily post using the html editor
10) Publish the thing

For a quick morning with 3 pictures and a single paragraph, steps 3-10
do not have to take more than 10 minutes. On longer days where I take up 
to 100 pictures of historical buildings etc. it takes only a bit of time
to name each picture, and the rest of the time is spent writing the article.


More Detail
-----------
Requires: gtk+, python-gtk, and image-magick (via system call with os.popen)

I use this on my ubuntu macbook (linux) but it would probably work with 
other operating systems. You'd just have to have gtk+ and the python
bindings, as well as image magick installed.

To run, simply dump your pictures into a folder. Then do:
   $ python view.py Day50/*.jpg

You will see a window pop up with a preview of each picture along with 
an input that prompts you to name the picture. When you put the name
into the box and hit "enter", several things happen:
1) The filename is generated based on the date, picture number, and the
   name you put into the box
2) ImageMagic is called to do several things:
   i) Add "Copyright Ault Park Sunrise 2011" in small text
  ii) Resize the image to web-appropriate dimensions. This is a smart
      resize that maintains aspect ratio.
 iii) Rotate the image if it was taken vertically
  iv) Name the image appropriately from #1
   v) Output the new file without deleting the original into the same 
      folder that the image was found in
3) Once the file is created, a wordpress-compatible html snippet is 
   dumped to stdout. The "url" in the image src is "estimated" based
   on the date format that wordpress uses. Like this:
       http://aultparksunrise.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/153_04_lunken_airfield_sunrise_4nn.jpg
   The snippet looks like this: <p><a href=><img src=/></a>Comment</p>
   The image is shrunken to fit on a standard widescreen resolution,
   and uses two wordpress classes - one to keep it large, and one to
   center the image on the page. The hyperlink links the image to 
   the full resolution image.

I have considered a future feature that includes dumping each file name
to a database so that it would be incredibly easy to dump an automatic
"best pictures" post, but for now it simply preps the images for the web.