I want an all-in-one graphics application…
This weekend I was trying to get some photos of my wife’s Christmas Ornaments sorted and posted to her new upcoming website (http://beadsnballs.com). It always proves to be a long, fairly complicated and repetitive process.
First I have to take the photos of the ornaments and upload them to my PC. I copy them to a source folder so that whatever I do to them later I have the originals. Then I open up Picasa as that seems to be the only free graphics program I have that will enable me to make simple 6″x4″ crops of the pictures easily. Then I have to save the pictures one at a time to another directory. When that’s done it’s time to open up IrfanView (another free graphics program). IrfanView will let me do a batch resize of several photos at once. I wanted to be able to make all the photos 600×400 pixels and so I can do this in two steps. First I identify the photos to resize and what size to make them. IrfanView puts the resized photos in a temporary folder and I have to copy 
them to the folder where I want them. So now I have what I need and all that needs to be done is to upload them to the website. This entails adding them all to a zip file so that the photo manager can more easily handle them and then they are good to go.
From end to end it’s about a 45 minute process once the photos are taken, providing there’s only 30 or so photos. But still, that’s a fair while. If I could find an application that would do it all for me in one simple go then that would be wonderful. There has to be something out there.
These are the sorts of tasks I don’t like doing and the sorts of tasks that computers should be better at doing. There are still some opportunities for technology improvements available to us all.
