Automated Copyright Registration Submission

[Ed Wolfstein]

This Option would be useful for pros who regularly submit work to the US Library of Congress for Copyright Registration. For those who register, I'll mention my workflow and feel free to comment.

After a month of shooting, I copy and resize EVERYTHING to a smaller size (around 600 pixels) and burn the results to a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM (depending on how much I have that month). I then do the online Registration with the Copyright Office, and mail in the disk (uploading is an option, but gigs of data takes long). In the past (as a Windows user, I automated this process using Archive Creator 3, which maintained the Folder structure and created an easy to navigate html file to find the images graphically as well.

Alas, Archive Creator is no more, and I've switched to Mac, so.... wouldn't it be nice if Photo Mechanic could do this batch processing as well? It can do it one Contact Sheet at a time (using Export) but with 15 to 25 events a month, it can take a lot of time, and a lot of organizing to make a nice, neat package, with Folder hierarchy, ready to burn.

Over even better: an interface with the Copyright Office to "one-click" register and/or upload the work. I don't know much about APIs or such, but am I dreaming here? Or would this be a useful pro feature for Photo Mechanic 5?

[mklass]

Sounds useful to me. I wonder if it's do-able.

[Kirk Baker]

Ed,

This Option would be useful for pros who regularly submit work to the US Library of Congress for Copyright Registration. For those who register, I'll mention my workflow and feel free to comment.

After a month of shooting, I copy and resize EVERYTHING to a smaller size (around 600 pixels) and burn the results to a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM (depending on how much I have that month). I then do the online Registration with the Copyright Office, and mail in the disk (uploading is an option, but gigs of data takes long). In the past (as a Windows user, I automated this process using Archive Creator 3, which maintained the Folder structure and created an easy to navigate html file to find the images graphically as well.

Alas, Archive Creator is no more, and I've switched to Mac, so.... wouldn't it be nice if Photo Mechanic could do this batch processing as well? It can do it one Contact Sheet at a time (using Export) but with 15 to 25 events a month, it can take a lot of time, and a lot of organizing to make a nice, neat package, with Folder hierarchy, ready to burn.

Over even better: an interface with the Copyright Office to "one-click" register and/or upload the work. I don't know much about APIs or such, but am I dreaming here? Or would this be a useful pro feature for Photo Mechanic 5?

Not for 5.0, but maybe in a later version.  We're pretty much booked up on features for 5.0 and we'll probably have to cut some planned features in order to get 5.0 out on time.

-Kirk

[FairfieldPhoto]

Add my vote for inclusion of this in a future release.  My New Years resolution for 2012 is to keep current on my copyright registration and would like to keep the process "in the family" consistent with how I use PM.    It tried to open my 2011 folder tree to generate a parallel directory folder of thumbnail images to ZIP up and send in for this year, but with 120,000 images on the drive, PM ran for a bit on 32-bit WinXP and just coughed and stopped with a "there were errors" message (which I interpreted to mean "Are you *&$%@# SERIOUS?!?!).

Other tools seem to be offering some good functions for organizing and submitting for copyright, but I just hate having a separate, out-of the-normal-flow tool for copyright registration purposes only.  It would be a "uni-tasker" in my shop and we all hate things that serve only one purpose.

Thanks for considering this for the future.

-M

[JAS Photo]

I requested something like this a while back -

My request would be:
an option to have anything uploaded to a photoshelter (or other) is also saved in a set minimum acceptable size in a "to copyright" folder in a similarly named subfolder.