StrivingLife presents ...

Yesterday afternoon I took digital photo number 10,000.

Between the three digital cameras that I've owned (and excluding the one that I borrowed from my sister, which was a gift from her friend Char), I've taken the following.

From April 6 2005 to May 9 2007, I took 2924 photos with a Canon 300D (Digital Rebel).

From May 18 2007 to March 29 2008, I took 6447 photos with a Canon Digital Rebel XT (350D).

From February 2 2008 to March 29 2008, I took 776 photos with a Casio EX-Z1200.

They say that your first 10,000 photos are your worst, and since I was only able to pick out a little more than 600 that I thought would be good enough to sell, I do hope that that's true.

Recently the much anticipated Photoshop Express was released. However, crawling through the general terms of use there's a rather troublesome paragraph.

Using the terms that are effective 3/1/2008, at http://www.photoshop.com/express/terms.html, we have the following at 8.a.:

Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

(Emphasis is my own.)

I'm lucky enough to have a copy of Photoshop CS2, but this paragraph has effectively removed it as an alternative while on someone else's machine, or as something I can recommend to others, professionally.

Now if the individual has their photo on some of the various 2.0 photo social networks, then I can recommend this, since their photos are effectively for anyone to do with as they will ('dump your friends').

But, as someone who wants to protect his work product ...

Xml4Ssp is a Windows XML generator for SlideShowPro. While the program still needs some work, it's pretty usable as it is.

Since there's no real documentation, I'll be covering how I ended up using it to generate my latest gallery.

Starting folder structure

I began with the following folder structure:

• casio_images
  •  Pearl
    • FullsizeImage
    • Images
    • Thumb

The only folder that contained content was the FullsizeImage directory, in which I dumped my JPG originals.

Xml4Ssp setup

Assuming it's already installed and started, I created a New gallery.

Next, I browsed to the gallery folder, and began filling out the rest as follows.

Browse gallery folder: C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Desktop\temp\casio_images

Album options

Images folder name: FullsizeImag
Album Title/Description: Use Foldername
Use Permalinks: None

Image options

Search for: JPG
Images caption: Use Filename
Use Hyperlink: None
Larger Image Folder: FullsizeImage

Thumb Options

Thumb folder name: Thumb
Create Thumbnails (checked)
Width: 100
Height: 75
Constrain proportion by Width
Resize method: nearest neighbor (Default)
Quality: 50

Cleanup

Once I generated, it successfully created the thumbnails, but did not create the resized images. This leads me to believe that the FullsizeImage directory is not resized at all.

On the one hand this is good, on the other, it would be nice if it did. You can fix this by saving the generated XML file and changing the Thumb folder name to another directory. Next, change the width/height/constrains/quality accordingly.

And with that, you've generated a gallery, with the necessary XML file, in less than usual time!