Nice and quiet here

Reading Elements of ML Programming Things are back to normal after my long warm summer break, I’m having lectures and classes as usual… except that our assignments are pretty easy right now because we’ve just started with Standard ML of New Jersey which is a pretty cool language. You can see me reading in our fine textbook Elements of ML Programming on the right.

The image is one of the better images I’ve taken with my new Sony DSC-V1 camera. I took it using the self-timer on a bright summer morning a couple of weeks ago. As one can tell, then there wasn’t a single cloud on the sky — I ate my breakfest outside and played a little with the camera before I headed for DAIMI.

I’ve already taken over 800 images in the three weeks I’ve had it, but I’ve “only” kept 280 of them for the rest were either boring (lots of test shots of my room), badly shaken because I’ve experimented with slow shutter speeds in low-light conditions or out of focus. But I believe I’m getting better as I practice more and more. The huge amount of images has made me think of making a program that can be used categorize the image. The program should be able to parse the EXIF headers that my camery embeds in the JPEG images and also be able to associate arbitrary keywords with each image. The program should probably also be able to do the copying of the images from the camery to the harddisk, for it’s important that the program gets to the images before they’re rotated or altered with other programs. The problem is that programs like the GIMP and feh remove the headers when they re-save the image. This is kind of annoying for the headers contain a lot of information about the shot, most importantly the date and time that could be used to sort the images nicely into monthly folders.

I guess that I’ll have to make some sort of image gallery here at GimpsterDotCom, but the images are huge — 2 MiB JPEG from the camera. I can probably bring them down to between 50–100 KiB by resizing them to 800×600 pixels (from the huge 2592×1944 pixel image the camera delivers) and compressing them harder, but that’s still between 10 and 20 MiB with 200 images! I’ve only got 15 MiB left of my quota here at GimpsterDotCom (where did the other 85 MiB go?) so I’ll have to clean up first or put the images somewhere else, such as DAIMI or something like that.

2 Comments

  1. Martin Geisler:

    The issue with programs like the GIMP removing the EXIF information is now solved — new versions know how to keep it.

  2. Martin Geisler:

    The program that I talk about, which would parse the EXIF data, is now here: it’s the [PHP EXIF Library][pel] which is a generic library for reading and writing EXIF information in JPEG and TIFF images.

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