Pics on Website

[chris]

Dear All,

I'm finally getting round to building the website that goes with the trip I completed over a year ago. I plan to have several photo galleries on it. I have all the software I need to manipulate the pics, build the site and the galleries for slideshows (Corel PhotoPaint, AdobePhotoshop, Marcromedia DreamweaverMX and FireWorksMX etc as well as various javascript freeware I found on the net).

However: I want to copyright my images by putting a little '(c)My Name/Year' in the corner/ on the edge of each image. On AB's excellent site (www.oasisphoto.com) he has this. Any idea how I do this without phsically writing on each image (in Corel or Adobe)? (I can't find this option in Dreamweaver). Is there any freeware software available for this purpose?

Or should I not worry about it? I'll have each image at only 72dpi and no bigger than 3/4 the size of a monitor, say 50 to 100kb.

Any comments welcome.

Safe riding and happy snapping,
ChrisB

[Photog Rob]

Hi Chris,

Chances are you'll be using copies of your images reduced to a specific size from your original file, no? so if you're already working on a copy, I'd say go ahead and have your credit directly on the image. Simplest is often best!

[chris]

Rob
Yes I'll be using scanned copies (from slides), cut down to size.

My question was if there is any software around that will write '(c) Chris Bright 2001' onto each (scanned and cropped) image for me, rather than me having to write on each image individually. I plan to have about 500 images on the website. Doctoring each one individually might take a while!

Thanks for your help.
ChrisB

[Photog Rob]

If you have access to photoshop, you can easily write an action to add the info; then you run a batch process that will apply that action to a whole folder of images. Quite easy to do, actually. Do consult Photoshop's help files, they are fantastic and easy to understand.

[chris]

Rob
Excuse my ignorance. I've just spent the last 45 minutes searching through the help menus of both Adobe Photoshop LE and Corel Photo-Paint 8 to find what you refer to, but have been less than successful. I've tried every combination of keyword(s) possible. Under which heading should I look?

Thanks,
ChrisB

[POB/London]

...might not be available in P'shop LE. Only full version?

[Photog Rob]

Originally posted by chris:
Corel PhotoPaint, AdobePhotoshop, Marcromedia DreamweaverMX and FireWorksMX etc as well as various javascript freeware I found on the net.

You never mentioned it was Photoshop LE... sorry 'bout that.

[A.B.]

Hi,

Chris, thanks for the kind words .

I have the full version of Photoshop and I considered setting up an Action to automatically add the copyright information to my images but I decided to put them manually instead. The reason is that I couldn’t settle on a text color / highlight / size / location combination that would work with all images. Take a look at my gallery and you’ll see that a lot of the pictures have different color text to distinguish them from the different background. Also I had to do it manually since I tried not to let the text interfere with the composition. I have a relatively small number of images on my site so I enjoyed giving each image that special attention.

But in the case of 500+ images, you definitely need a batch processing software. And to overcome the problem I mentioned above, considers automatically adding a black strip to the bottom of the image on which you write your copyright text on, that way it will work with all the images. The downside is that it’s easier to remove.

Photoshop would do a great job at this but I wouldn’t fork out $500 just for that feature. Although I have to say if you’re serious about photography or graphics you should get it. There are a few shareware tools out there on the net that does this kind of job well. I haven’t been using those since I got Photoshop so you’ll have to do some searching and experimenting.

A quick search on download.com for the keywords “batch” & “image” resulted in the following:

http://download.com.com/3120-20-0.ht...age&tg=dl-2001

I quickly came upon this utility

http://www.batchimage.com/product/batchit/index.html

I never tried it before myself so this isn’t a recommendation just the first one that popped up but it claims to do just what you want.

I wouldn’t skip putting on my copyright and website on the images. You’d be amazed on how fast images travel through out the web and how people take credit for it.

IMHO the script that you’ll use to serve these images is perhaps the most important factor of all to a successful image gallery. I wouldn’t bother with scripts that require me to upload images using ftp or manually create thumbnails. It will take forever to prepare, populate, upload and edit your galleries using such scripts. I strongly recommend getting Gallery. It’s a dream to use and very powerful. You can upload your images in any size and it will resize the images according to your settings, create thumbnails, lets you upload via the web or a windows application and much much more. That’s the one I use in OasisPhoto.com . It’s a PHP script so it will work on almost any web hosting server.

Let me know if you need help with setting any of this up.

Hope this helps.

------------------
A.B.

OasisPhoto.com – Images from the Magical Sahara.
ShortWheelbase.com – Jeep preparations.

[geokobbi]

Hi

Look at Arles Image web page creator. I used this tool to put the logo of my caving club to pictures posted on the web (see this and this).

Jakob

------------------

[chris]

All,
Many thanks for your advice. Now I understand: Limited Edition means 'limited, crap, not very good' as opposed to 'super duper, special paint job, alloy wheels etc.' C'est la vie

Thanks for the links and advice on the copyright thing. I'll shareware it when I have my 500 slides scanned and test it/them.

I've been playing with the gallery function on DreamweaverMX and I think it is ok for what I need.

Hope to have the site up this summer.

Cheers
ChrisB

[Grant Johnson]

Chris, be sure to check out the Dreamweaver extensions - there's at least one more sophisticated than the included one in DWMX.

And Fireworks MX can do what you want, BUT one at a time. It's a very nice tool once you get the hang of it. Tweaking text subtly as AB mentions is easy.

With that many large photos make sure you have sufficient bandwidth in your hosting package. Check out ours, we highly recommend them in every way. Every once in a while we look around for a better deal, and end up staying where we are.

------------------
Grant Johnson

Seek, and ye shall find.
------------------------

One world, Two wheels.
www.HorizonsUnlimited.com