Joel Hainley : San Francisco Bay Area Software Consultant

I was doing some work for a client this weekend and needed to resize a photo. I dusted off the picprep source, built the app, and did what I needed to do, but i noticed an odd problem in the way it worked. So i earmarked that for further investigation when my work was done. Sure enough, when I got some time to look at it in detail there was a bug in picprep, and it was a kinda major bug.

I know how it made it this long without being discovered, the bug only shows up when you are working against single files, and not doing appending of characters to the output filenames, but i should have caught this a lot sooner. I fixed the bug, and then started looking through the rest of the source and found some interesting things in my notes about this project. I had mentioned that I would port this to linux at some point. However when i looked at the source, it had been ported to linux ( i think i did this one morning when shad needed it, and forgot to package it up for general release ) So the application now runs natively on windows/osx/linux, pretty cool on that deal.

I thought of a couple of features that I could use in this product so perhaps when time allows i’ll add them they include :

• rotate process : the ability to rotate images would be nice
• collage process : the ability to point picprep at a bunch of image files and have it turn them into a single large file would be nice. this would include the ability to generate an image map coordinates file back to the original pictures such that you could drop the resulting image and coords onto a webpage and have a interface into the pictures
• command files : it would be convenient to be able to save a set of operations into a text file such that if you were always wanting to process files in a particular manner you could just drop them into some directory and then say “run these commands on this directory”. The thing about picprep is that its processes are discrete operations such that if you want to rotate, add border and then create a collage that is three seperate commands that must be issued to picprep in series, having the ability to create command files for multi-step operations would obviate the need of ways to chain the operations together internally.
• border process : i haven’t looked into this but i’ve seen a bunch of images on the web where people add a little white border around their photos, I guess to give it the polaroid instamatic touch. It might be kinda nice to be able to say “add border to these photos”

I’ll probably spend some time on this when I need a little bit of sanity in my life. The myndkryme website has been down for a while not sure why, haven’t talked to the ISP about it yet. So if you want new builds of picprep ask me directly here, and i’ll get them posted somewhere where you can download them.