How to copy/resize large group of RAW images.

[William R Wood]

I shoot mostly Canon RAW images and then convert to DNG - the average file size is about 7MB so only about 90 images will fit on a standard CD.  My daughter wants copies of thousands of my images.  Not practical to email or FTP them, she is on a dial up internet connection and neither of us has FTP server software.  The only practical way I see to do this is to convert thousands of RAWs to JPG and resize them to about 800 pixels max on a side (file size would then be about 500KB) then burn to CD.

The Burn Photos to Disk command will not extract the JPG previews from the RAW files and resize them before burning to CD.  The Save As command does not work on RAW images.  I looked at the Export command but it does not appear to make sense for this task?  Plus I don't want thousands of resized JPG copies of my RAW images on my hard drive (obviously I can manually delete them but would prefer not to have to).

Is there any reasonable way to perform this task in PM?  If not, is there any hope that the Burn Photos to Disk command could be upgraded.  The best way would seem to be the method used by the Send Photos by Email command.  That command appears to extract the JPG previews from the RAWs, resize them, create temporary resized image files, then attach them to an email.  This is an excellent solution since you get a resized image attached to your email but no permanent copy of the resized file is stored on your hard drive.  The resized images are stored in Temporary Internet Files which get deleted in due course by the O/S (XP anyway - don't know how Macs work).

Regards

Bill Wood 

[Kirk Baker]

Bill,

I shoot mostly Canon RAW images and then convert to DNG - the average file size is about 7MB so only about 90 images will fit on a standard CD.  My daughter wants copies of thousands of my images.  Not practical to email or FTP them, she is on a dial up internet connection and neither of us has FTP server software.  The only practical way I see to do this is to convert thousands of RAWs to JPG and resize them to about 800 pixels max on a side (file size would then be about 500KB) then burn to CD.

The Burn Photos to Disk command will not extract the JPG previews from the RAW files and resize them before burning to CD.  The Save As command does not work on RAW images.  I looked at the Export command but it does not appear to make sense for this task?  Plus I don't want thousands of resized JPG copies of my RAW images on my hard drive (obviously I can manually delete them but would prefer not to have to).

Is there any reasonable way to perform this task in PM?  If not, is there any hope that the Burn Photos to Disk command could be upgraded.  The best way would seem to be the method used by the Send Photos by Email command.  That command appears to extract the JPG previews from the RAWs, resize them, create temporary resized image files, then attach them to an email.  This is an excellent solution since you get a resized image attached to your email but no permanent copy of the resized file is stored on your hard drive.  The resized images are stored in Temporary Internet Files which get deleted in due course by the O/S (XP anyway - don't know how Macs work).

There is currently no direct way to do what you want without creating temporary files from your RAW photos.  The Burn Photos to Disc feature is for archival purposes and as such has no facility for resizing images.

It is possible to add such capability to the disc burning feature but I don't know how many people such a feature addition would benefit.

I'd be happy to hear opinions from other users.

-Kirk

[Hayo Baan]

Bill,

I may have an option for you here

Currently there is no way to do this directly with PM.  I however found a great work-around: use the export function.  Take, e.g., PM Classic.  With the export you can specify quality, size, etc. of the images exported.

There are a few disadvantages to this solution of course, but with a little bit of scripting yourself you can circumvent these.  The major problems (I see) are:
1. Thumbs and html-files are generated as well, resulting in a lot of clutter and extra overhead.
You can get around this by editing and amending the ruby export script and/or create your own.

2. Image files are called xxxx.yyy.jpg (where xxxx.yyy is the original file name)
A little command-line scripting gets around this.

3. Files get dumped into one big directory (images and thumbs).
Again not too difficult to solve with a bit of scripting and/or drag and drop.

Hope this helps,

[William R Wood]

Hayo,

Thanks for the tips - tried your suggestions (manually - I don't know how to write Ruby scripts) on a small batch of images but it is actually much easier for me to use another program (Lightroom, for example) that already has a specific feature to convert to JPG and resize the ~3000 CR2/DNG images my daughter wants copies of and burn them to maybe 2 CDs.

Regards

Bill

[Kirk Baker]

Bill,

Thanks for the tips - tried your suggestions (manually - I don't know how to write Ruby scripts) on a small batch of images but it is actually much easier for me to use another program (Lightroom, for example) that already has a specific feature to convert to JPG and resize the ~3000 CR2/DNG images my daughter wants copies of and burn them to maybe 2 CDs.

I have created a custom Export template that should do what you want:

http://camerabits.fileburst.com/Image.zip

You need to create a "custom templates folder" and extract Image.zip into it.  Then use the Files tab of the Preferences dialog to point your "Location of user templates" at your "custom templates folder".  Now when you use the Export feature, there will be an exporter named "Image" that will export images scaled to fit a width/height box with custom file naming, watermarking, etc.  It will work with your CR2/DNG files but will be limited to the size of your embedded previews.

It is not a final solution, but it will do the job until we make Save As able to do the same thing in version 4.6...

HTH,

-Kirk

[William R Wood]

Kirk,

Just tried your new Export template - works perfectly.  Thanks a million.

Did not know there was such a thing as User Templates.  Is there a source I can read to learn how to create them?  I also noticed a folder called Ruby.  Maybe I could learn something about scripting as well as suggested by Hayo.

Regards

Bill Wood

[Kirk Baker]

Bill,

Just tried your new Export template - works perfectly.  Thanks a million.

Great!

Did not know there was such a thing as User Templates.  Is there a source I can read to learn how to create them?  I also noticed a folder called Ruby.  Maybe I could learn something about scripting as well as suggested by Hayo.

The best resource for writing your own template is the current set of templates in the shipping product.  The Ruby language is very powerful and expressive.  There are a lot of online resources (documentation, tutorials, and code examples) on the web.

-Kirk