What's the fastest way to get thousands of photos from camera resized and uploaded to web?

Question

Currently, for shooting sports events, my workflow contains following sequential steps:

• shoot at location (JPEG for smaller files and minimum post-processing);
• batch resize all photos into a size that suits better for web and limited hosting resources;
• upload the resized photos.

With hundreds or thousands of photos from an event (and I'm not using continuous shooting), this all takes hours to finish, especially because during first step the photos are just sitting there. From server logs, I can see people are expecting the photos to arrive sooner.

I imagine that the workflow would complete faster if the steps could be parallelized, so that resizing and uploading of first photos would start instantly instead of many hours after shooting them.

I know there are Eye-Fi cards to get photos to a local Wi-Fi device, but what next? Is there some software that would resize incoming photos and send them off over mobile broadband (via FTP or HTTP)? I do think resizing has to happen locally, as the broadband is not that broad.

Having a Raspberry Pi lying around, I'd be interested in a Linux-based solution, but a mobile app would do as well. A laptop would be too heavy and power-hungry to carry around all day.

Answer 1

If you can set up your Raspberry Pi to listen on WiFi, my suggestion is as follows:

1. Install imagemagick on the Pi to get the convert utility.
2. Set up the Pi with an SSID and NFS/SMB/whatever shared folder to receive the images.
3. Script something in bash like for x in *.jpg; do convert -resize 50% $x; done. You can poll the folder on the Pi for changes, too, so you can execute this relatively quickly - see: this SE thread. Note that convert will resize the image in-place, so no pesky duplicate files to handle.
4. Execute your command of choice to push the images to your sshd/ftpd/httpd server right after the resize command finishes in the script.

nb. This is my first SE answer (although I've been reading photo.se for a long time, hope it's helpful.)

Answer 2

Photo Mechanic is one of the most widely used products by photojournalists due to the speed you can read your cards, scan thumbnails, add metatdata and upload images. It's a standalone program which runs on Mac and Windows - I don't think there's a version for Linux.

If you have a Eye-Fi card, Photo Mechanic can monitor folders for new files as you shoot them (so as Eye-Fi uploads images, Photo Mechanic can import them). It can add IPTC data from a tempalte as it read them. It's supposed to be super fast at generating thumbnails and for searching and tagging. It can crop, scale, and upload to various services, and also has a feature where you can upload to a remote catalog over HTTP.

I haven't used it myself, so can't say it meets all your requirements, but it's recognised as the premier product for in-the-field cataloguing of images.

Answer 3

Photoshop has a batch-gallery creator (from a folder) and so you'll get also thumbnails and big-images

File -> Automate -> Web Photo Gallery => Check the Options select box

Update: I used and liked XnView - http://www.xnview.com/ I can see it also has a linux version. It's way light than Photoshop

Answer 4

I used a Nikon D4 which embeds IPTC into RAWS and jpgs. Before an event I upload a batch of templates into the camera. D4 is USB connected to my Pi but you can also connect it via wifi to avoid wires. the RAWS are stored on a HD and the jpgs sent to my database running php scripts to retreive the metadata and flash them beside the thumbnails on my website. The Pi is connected to my server either by ethernet, wifi or 3G. Camera and pi run on batteries. Wifi dongle on Pi works without using a powered usb hub as well. The pi runs cronjobs, and also waits for new files. It can resize files too using gphoto2. Best. Laurent

Answer 5

I would suggest investing in a programmer.

A programmer can easily make a python script to resize an image and copy it to a directory that is under control of Dropbox.

Then, dropbox uploads your resized image to it's cloud service. And you share your dropbox folder with your customers.

Voila.!

1. Shoot tethered/eyefi/wifi to copy to a directory.
2. Have python script poll/get notified when a new file appears.
3. Have python script open file, resize, maybe even throw a watermark for good measure.
4. Have python script copy to your dropbox folder.
5. Have Dropbox.exe running on your computer.

www.dropbox.com