Here’s an image from my new Canon S60, shot on automatic, by someone with no eye and less talent.

Morningglory in the afternoon

I altered it only by cropping it. I refrained — for demonstration purposes only — from tinkering with the color and contrast with my photo-shoppish software, but in general I’m with Tim Bray on the question of photographic “integrity.”

I’ve spent most of my leisure hours over the past couple of days writing a VB script (I have no shame) that does the following with a single button press once you’ve dragged a photo(s) into it:

Runs imagemagick and produces a copy sized appropriately for my blog and a thumbnail version

Displays the image, and lets me enter a caption and an Alt tag

FTPs the copies to my web site

Downloads and displays the copies to confirm that the FTP worked

Moves the copies into the designated directory on my hard drive

Writes the relevant linking lines of html and copies them to the clipboard so I can paste them into my blog

Don’t get me wrong: What I wrote is a horrible, kludgy bit of disasterware that will fail to work in a rich variety of everyday situations. But doesn’t every blogger who is hosting her own blogging software go through roughly the same thing? So, why isn’t there freeware that does this for us automatically? (Here’s where you get to tell me that it exists, it’s great, and everyone uses it already.)

[Later: It sounds like Britt’s been thinking along related lines…way ahead of me, as usual.]

Another complaint about the software that came with the Canon.

I’ve already uninstalled the photo management stuff because it was just too cumbersome. But I kept the ArcSoft Camera Suite because its photo editing tool seemed ok. But, it turns out that when it saves an edited photo, it doesn’t save some of the data that ImageMagick needs to work with the photo. (Is it stripping out EXIF stuff?) I learned this by spending about 2 hours trying to figure out why certain photos just weren’t being accepted by the program I describe above.

Categories: Uncategorized dw