Preparing photos for a web photo album 

http://www.valibuk.net/?p=34

A few tips how to prepare photos for a web photo album:

  1. Make a copy of the picture that you would like to have on web. The following steps include instructions that will irreversibly change your photos.
  2. Rotate them correctly. A lot of cameras writes an information about the rotation into the header of a image file (one of the EXIF values). Unfortunately not all web albums can recognise this information correctly.

    Install the jhead application and type this:
    jhead -autorot photo.jpg
  3. Remove unnecessary data. My Canon camera saves also a thumbnail of the photo into the image file, that is cca 10kB. It is completely useless for a web album (it will create its own thumbnails anyway).

    It is easy to remove it with the jhead application:
    jhead -dt photo.jpg
    Of course, the first and the second step can be done together for all
    your pictures:
    jhead -dt -autorot *
  4. Reduce the resolution. If you do not need to publish your photos in the full resolution (no, you do not need, indeed ;), it is a good idea to reduce the resolution to save visitor's time and bandwidth.

    I like the mogrify application from the ImageMagick package. The
    following line reduces the resolution to 1024x768 and reduces the JPEG
    quality to 70%:
    mogrify -resize 1024x768 -quality 70 *

Do not worry about rotated photos, mogrify will handle them correctly.

Well, your photos (as image files) are ready for your web album :)

P.S.

For the SimpleViewer Flash album viewer I make a copy of image files to the thumbs directory and use the following command to make thumbnails:

mogrify -resize 65x65 *

documented on: October 30, 2006, ondrej