Out of all the ways to save space in our photo gallery, it looks like the greatest and most obvious savings will come from using increased levels of JPEG compression.

We already reduce our photos to a pixel dimension of 640×480, both to save disk space and screen real estate. But that reduction alone is not enough.

Currently, the photos that iPhoto exports are close to 100% JPEG quality, which entails a very minimal amount of compression. On the up-side, this produces very good looking, sharp images. On the down-side, this takes up a relatively large amount of space.

So, I can easily use a program called ***ImageMagick|http://www.imagemagick.org/*** to batch-convert the files in our gallery to use higher levels of JPEG compression. This will result in photos which look slightly less sharp, but which take up dramatically less space on the server.

The real issue is: what level of compression is acceptable?

To that end, I have whipped up a very quick page of comparison which I would like all of our readers to take a look at:

***Three Guys Photo Comparison|http://prwdot.org/3guys.html***

The photo is a pic of Me, Bob, and Jeremy, and I have it shown at compression levels all the way from the original down to 5% quality. I also have notes on the side to indicate the size of the file, the quality level, and the percentage of space saved.

Let us know via the comments what you think the cutoff point should be as far as when the photos are no longer pleasing to view. There are a few obvious conclusions you can come to based on the rate of change in savings percentage, but I’d like to hear what everyone thinks.

Thanks!

Update: I’ve created a couple other samples for you to take a look at:

***Becky Photo Test|http://prwdot.org/becky-pic.html***
***Colors Photo Test|http://prwdot.org/colors.html***

These should give you a better idea of how the compression level varies based on the actual content of the photos. Images with more colors tend to compress less, where images with few colors compress a lot more.

We’ve revived an old feature of our website: ***Feet|http://gallery.prwdot.org/feet***

Hope you enjoy it!

Just as I was pulling in to the gym parking lot, I spotted the spectacular sunset stretching over the area of the ***Cummings Center|http://www.cummings.com/ccpage.html***. So I spent a few minutes ***taking some photos|http://gallery.prwdot.org/cummings_sunset*** before I went in.

It’s good to keep a camera handy.

This morning, Becky and I went out to do some sunrise photography. I should have listened to her when she suggested that we go to Singing Beach first… instead I drove to Manchester harbor. There were some nice photo opportunities there, but it wasn’t the best view of the sunrise itself. So we went to Singing Beach… by the time we go there, the sun was already well above the horizon, and it was much too bright to get any really good shots. But I took some just the same. If you’re interested in seeing what I shot, you can see the photos ***here|http://gallery.prwdot.org/sunrise***.

Next time, we’ll go to the beach first!

Despite the near-zero temperatures, I decided today would be a good day for some ***photography|http://gallery.prwdot.org/cold_day***.

Just a little note: I’ve reorganized the Nor’easter gallery into sub-albums, broken down by day and time, so that you can see how the snow progressed!

***Nor’easter Gallery|http://gallery.prwdot.org/noreaster***

As of 8 p.m., the snow has stopped. Beverly and several other North Shore communities have declared states of emergency, and everyone’s trying to dig out to get ready for a regular work day tomorrow. The street leading to our apartment building seems to have been plowed, but as yet nobody has plowed out our parking lot, so we can’t get our cars out. Hopefully they’ll be able to plow it some time tonight or early tomorrow morning, so that folks can get where they need to go… but if not, I guess it could be a late morning at work!

Due to growing space constraints, I’ve purged some albums from our online photo galleries. Probably most folks won’t notice that they’re gone, but in case you do, I do have them backed up off-line. I may put them back online when I’ve done some work with shrinking them down.

Any photos that I’ve taken in the last month or two have gone through the pPhoto import process – a Perl script I designed that does the work of downloading, archiving, resizing, and uploading photos to our gallery. This process has produced much more storage-space-efficient photos, as well as saved a lot of time and enabled me to get photos online much more quickly.

I’ve also noticed that on the new camera, although it does not have an orientation sensor *per se*, there is an ability to rotate the photos while viewing them on the camera. I did some testing, and found that this does not actually rotate the photos, but rather marks them with an EXIF orientation header as though they had been taken on a camera with orientation sensing. I should be able to use this in my script in order to automatically rotate the photos before archiving and uploading them, saving me even more time.

Another thing that has amazed me is the A70’s battery life, at least when powered by AA NiMH 2000 mAh batteries. On Thanksgiving, when Becky and I were walking around Boston, and then in South Boston at the dinner, I had the same set of batteries in the camera the entire time, and at the end of the day, I still had plenty of juice left!

The A70 continues to amaze me. I’m having a blast getting to know its more advanced features. A couple changes that I’ve started making in my technique are to disable the AiAF, and to pay careful attention to the white balance settings before taking lots of photographs.

AiAF is a feature on the A70 that can evaluate up to five distinct points in the photograph and choose which one would be best to focus on. Sometimes the A70 can make an intelligent decision, but other times, it makes an awful decision, causing your photo to be out of focus. In ‘Auto’ mode, the A70 is hardwired to use AiAF, while in all other modes, AiAF can be turned off. My solution is to use, at a minimum, the “P” mode, and to turn off AiAF. This leaves me with the center-aimed AF box, which is fine – just aim at what you want to focus on, lock in the focus by pressing the shutter button down halfway, and then recompose your shot as desired.

As for white balance settings… the A70 has an automatic white balance setting that in many cases produces correctly colored photographs. However, there are many scenarios where it does not produce the desired results. For example, if you look at the ***Thanksgiving|http://gallery.prwdot.org/thanksgiving*** photo gallery, you’ll notice that many of the photos have a yellowish cast. Then you’ll notice that towards the end, they started to look a bit better. While the Lowe’s apartment *does* have some yellow walls, that should not have caused the photos to look the way they did. Towards the end, I changed the white balance setting to Incandescent/Tungsten, which properly adjusts for the type of lights they had inside. In the future, I will need to be sure that each time I change to a different lighting scenario, I adjust the white balance to the proper setting. Even better would be to calibrate it manually using a grey card… which I don’t have, but would like. *hint hint* 🙂

This morning was crisp, cold, and partly cloudy… which made it a good time to do a little photography in the town we call home. I took a walk to ***Independence Park|http://gallery.prwdot.org/independence_park***. This park is just a short walk down the street from our apartment. It runs along Lothrop Street in Beverly, and has a beach facing the Atlantic Ocean. The most “lovely” feature, I feel, is the excellent view of the PG&E coal-burning power plant across the harbor in Salem. I also made up a panoramic shot of the park, beach, and ocean, which you can see at the end of the photo gallery, or view ***here|http://prwdot.org/mov/independence_park.mov***, in QuickTime VR format,(4.5 megabytes), if you have a relatively fast connection and an up-to-date version of QuickTime.

While I was gone, Becky started whipping up some cookie dough, and when I returned, we made some cookies with this nifty cookie press we got. You stick all the dough in a tube, and then hook up a caulk-gun like attachment to it, with a metal plate of sorts on the top. Squeeze the trigger, and the dough is pressed through the plate, creating a cookie in that plate’s particular pattern. This got me to thinking – in TV commercials nowadays, you see parents and children “making cookies” with the pillsbury dough-in-a-tube, or even more recent, the pre-made-dough-bits-in-a-sheet…. just break ’em and bake ’em! I see a day coming where children will watch old movies and ask, “Why are they mixing all of that goop in the bowl? Why don’t they go down to the hypermart and buy ConGlomCoEZBakeSheetz like you do, daddy?” I mean, I’m sure those things taste just as good as cookies made from scratch, but come on – it’s not too much more effort to make up your own batch of dough!

There was a point somewhere in all of that, but I’m sure it’s long since forgotten.

In any case, I hope your holiday season is shaping up to be a joyful one.