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When I first came to Collections about fifteen years ago I had barely touched a computer and certainly didn't know how to make them go. Practically the first thing I did was to sit down infront of the old Amstrad 1640 and look at the database we were using, basically it was being used as little more than a card index and I quickly discovered there was masses more that could be done if someone took the trouble to learn how. This set me off on an endless quest that has taken me through the creation of database programmes for Collections and BAPLA in the Dbase language, the creation of web sites in HTML and more recently the extension of the web sites with Javascript and the writing of Photoshop scripts to streamline work. All of this I learned from scratch, on my own.
I have never been taught any programming languages and never showed any aptitude for either languages or mathematics at school. I always knew that scripting was possible in Photoshop, but had never had the nerve to try, but when you have had to go through 120 files from a contributor doing exactly the same thing to every one of them, by hand, you eventually realise that the time has come to do something about it. If you are fairly logically minded then programming languages are not that hard, you have to do it right of course or it simply does not work. My first step when trying something new is to trawl the web for an instance of something similar, there are masses of sites for people to share ideas and chunks of code and even if you don't use it yourself you have the opportunity to see how the code works and write your own. The manuals tend to give you little more than the bare bones and are often more confusing than helpful, they will give you a bald explanation of a command, but not how to use it or the example will use some parameter that you can't find an explanation for. Fortunately it is rare that your programme will do any harm, especially if you test it on dummy files, but I have had my fare share of getting locked into inescapable loops, freezing the machine or, if you’re lucky, obtuse error messages telling you it expected a “)” on line 45 and when you look it is actually there, but the colon is in the wrong place!
So, Now I have a small arsenal of scripts that in turn import contributors pictures from their CDs, edit and reformat captions and keywords, insert our unique number, rename, resize, convert to jpeg and write a data file for uploading to the web site. Submissions that might have taken a day to turn round can now be done in a couple of hours.
The ease of processing is heavily dependant on the quality of what is sent by the contributors of course, some things will always have to be done by hand such as correcting the lightness, colour and saturation of the pictures and correcting the spelling of the captions (it does matter!). Some contributors are much better at this than others.
Now, if I could come up with a script that did the editing as well. . .
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