Mogrify Me

In my copious amounts of free time I maintain a website for our twin girls.  Although it is now dedicated to my children, it was created years ago before the proliferation of photo sharing sites as a place where I could post pictures of my wife and myself travelling.  I use a PHP based photoblogging package called PixelPost (http://www.pixelpost.org/) and in general like having the freedom to control how the website is locked down (I opted for minimalist approach and use basic authentication in Apache) ensuring photos of the kids are not readily accessible to the all powerful Google and others (naieve thinking I suppose but maybe being a very small fish in a large pond has its advantages).  In retrospect if I had to do it over again perhaps I would have become an early adopter of an online service like Flickr or others but it serves its purpose and my relatives are hooked on using it.
Fast forward to this past Christmas where I jumped headfirst into the wonderful world of digital SLRs.  After quite a bit of research I purchased a Canon EOS REBEL T2i because at the time it was the only model in its class that had full HD video.  Mainly though I just wanted it for its rediculously fast FPS ensuring I wouldn't miss "the perfect photo" with the twins running around at full speed.  At the same time I purchased the SLR, I also bought an Eye-Fi SD Card (http://www.eye.fi/) for the camera.
The capabilities in the Eye-Fi card presented a unique opportunity to play towards my laziness with the twins website.  The greatest chore I found with the site was taking the SD Card from my camera out and copying up whatever photos I wanted to publish.  This card would remove that step and with a bit of extra work I could automate the whole process (as a side note, the Eye-Fi also has an online sharing feature that allows you to integrate with Flickr, Facebook, Picassa and MobileMe).  Using the wireless ftp feature of the card I was able to setup a transfer of images I protected on the camera to my Mini-Mac.  I then created a few cron scripts that take the uploaded images and push them to the twins website.

This is where things ended up getting interesting.  Along with storing the full image for backup/recovery purposes, I wanted to be able to script an automatic resize of the image to 800x600 upon upload as well as rotate it if needed (i.e., if it was taken as a portrait) and create a thumbnail image (for the PixelPost Admin interface).   Using the ImageMagick package (and specifically the mogrify command) this in fact was pretty painless.  Again, my whole goal in this was to make a completely automated process from the point I protect the image on my camera to when the images are published on the twins website.
Resizing was as easy as issuing the following command:
mogrify -resize 800x600 $destimg
Rotating was just a bit harder as I used the following PHP script I created based on source in PixelPost to extract out the EXIF data for the image:
<!--?php date_default_timezone_set('UTC');$img = "$argv[1]";$myorient = copy_folder_get_exif_orient($img);function copy_folder_get_exif_orient($image_name){ if (file_exists("/var/www/html/twinswebsite/includes/exifer1_5/exif.php")) require_once("/var/www/html/twinswebsite/includes/exifer1_5/exif.php"); $curr_image = $image_name; if (function_exists('read_exif_data_raw')) { $exif_result = read_exif_data_raw($curr_image,"0"); $orient = $exif_result['IFD0']['Orientation']; // Date and Time if ($orient=='') $orient = 'bad'; } else $orient = "bad"; return $orient;}?>
From the extracted EXIF data, it was possible to parse the orientation of the image:
theData=`php /var/www/html/twinswebsite/admin/ext_exif_orient.php $destimg`theDegrees=`echo "$theData" | awk '{print $1}'`
If the orientation of the image is portrait, the script is able to rotate the image as appropriate:
if [ $theDegrees == "Normal" ]then echo "$fullimg is landscape no rotation necessary"else theDirection=`echo "$theData" | awk '{print $3}'` if [ $theDirection == "CW" ] then mogrify -rotate 270 $destimg mogrify -rotate 270 $thumbimg else mogrify -rotate 90 $destimg mogrify -rotate 90 $thumbimg fifi
It is amazing sometimes how sheer lazyness pays off in the end.  Now instead of images sitting on my camera, I really do not have any excuse not to find images I want to publish, protect them, and have them be published automatically.  The entire process end-to-end takes only a few minutes from the time I protect an image to when it is published on my PixelPost photoblog.
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