New photo blog tool
Announcing PicBlog!
A tool that aims to simplify and speedup the process to upload pictures and notes to FTP sites.
A concern I've seen often reported by people taking pictures with a digital camera is the convoluted process they have to endure to make their picture available on the web: transfer the images to their PC, resize them to a "web acceptable" format, upload them to an FTP site and either create some HTML or use some web-based tool to add notes and comments to the images.
With PicBlog, just enter the name of the album you want to create, point it to the folder where the images are (and this could be the memory card in the camera itself!), click upload and you're done.
Well, almost. PicBlog resizes (if needed) and uploads the images to a FTP site, then creates an XML file that contains the list of all the pictures in this album and the related notes.
This is an example file (named wedding.xml):
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<gallery>
<author>
<name>Paolo Marcucci</name>
<email>paolo@paolomarcucci.com</email>
<url>http://www.paolomarcucci.com</url>
</author>
<title>Wedding</title>
<date>Sunday, September 24, 2000</date>
<images>
<image>
<filename>9007-22.640x426.jpg</filename>
<notes>Some people have bodyguards, we had an aircraft carrier to keep an eye on the wedding...</notes>
</image>
<image>
<filename>9342-03.640x426.jpg</filename>
<notes>The Contract</notes>
</image>
<image>
<filename>9346-09.320x480.jpg</filename>
<notes>Someone in this picture is kinda worried and it's not me!</notes>
</image>
</images>
</gallery>
If anyone wants to take a look at the source (C#), just drop me a line.
I'll comment on a couple of interesting features I used in writing this program in some other posts tomorrow...