iMagine Photo is an ‘application’ whose sole purpose is to provide an Applescript interface for manipulating photos. It supports crop, rotate, color manipulation, border, text, exif writing and more. It’s a great tool for adding into your new automator actions or applescripts.

I remember seeing this about a year ago, seeing the price, weighed against my need for such a tool, and moved along. I recently came back to check it out, and as of January 2005, it’s now free! It has a lot of functinality, example scripts, and automator actions. Check it out.

I’m in the process of learning the Flickr API and writing a weblog/gallery page for displaying images in my Flickr gallery. This has a lot of benefits in terms of storage space, ease of sharing/uploading, provided thumbnails in small, and square formats, and building photosets.

Overall Flickr is great, and I even opted now for the $25/year “pro” membership that gives me 2GB upload/month. This beats the current 250MB that I’m currently allowed total at my current hosting service. And the API allows for full interface to all of my photos, sets, data, etc. that is stored on Flickr.

Also, there are some great tools for working with Flickr. By far the most useful to me is Spier’s FlickrExport, which is a direct export from iPhoto to Flickr. One can build photosets, add tags, resize, and convert from TIFF. However, the last issue is causing me problems. Somewhere from my iPhoto library, through FlickrExport to Flickr, the EXIF data is being lost. Exporting JPG images to Flickr works fine, but I think FlickrExport drops it. Losing the EXIF data is definitely not an option. However, I currently archive all my images in TIFF to avoid artifacts showing up in editing/saving.

So now I need to figure out if I have to save all my images in JPG format, and just be careful; check out FlickrExport code and see if I can modify how it converts from TIFF to JPG for upload, or use another, external uploader tool.

You can view my geographically located photographs by accessing My (temporary?) Mappr page. Pretty slick.

Mappr is the location-based ‘mod’ to Flickr that posts pictures on a map based on location. This is a great idea. However, it requires a user include the location in the ‘tags’, such as city & state or zipcode in their Flickr post. A simple enough means to get the location of your Flickr photos and doesn’t require users to upload pictures to yet another server. Unfortunately Mappr doesn’t use latitude and longitude coordinates, and is limited to the United States.

There’s no reason it has to be restricted to the US, but I guess they’re doing a proof of concept first.

Photon is now free (via Red Ferret Journal - I likada weasel). It’s an iPhoto export plugin for sending photos to your wordpress (or MovableType/Blogsom/et. al.) blog. However, I personally still don’t like the Pictorialis II modification of Wordpress (good idea and work, but not quite polished). It’s been difficult to get setup and definitely not recommended yet for non-hacking geeks.

However, the ability for someone, from the warm embrace of iPhoto, to post to their blog is highly appealing.

In similar news, I’ll try and document some of the hacks I’ve made to HighEarthOrbit’s Wordpress install for fellow ‘Pressers.