BilikFamily.com

Kid pix - Once we got the twins down to bed, I started work on the pictures in my camera. Between taking pictures of the kids and the basement, I had my work cut out for me. I separated out the family pictures from the semi-boring basement pictures. I then did my usual Photoshop work on the family pictures. You can see the results in this photo album.

Basement - Weeks ago after the drywall started to be hung, Chris (a basement finishing pro) asked that I take pictures along the way to show the progress of things. You can see the progress in this album. I didn't want to spend a lot of effort in Photoshop. It was supposed to be a "quick and dirty" album. I took the folder of images, created a caption file, scaled the images way down in size and quality, and was about ready to upload it. Somewhere along the line I noticed that this album was about three times the expected size. I'd forgotten that if you take the images as is, you'll have all the extra camera header information embedded in the files, bloating all the images and especially the small thumbnail images. Normally Photoshop removes this cruft when you say "Save for Web" but I had skipped this step because I wasn't using Photoshop for these photos. The extra header info wastes a bunch of disk space and makes things load much more slowly in a web browser (especially if you have phone dialup internet). I made this mistake once before years ago. I wrote a quick script to strip the camera data out of the pictures and regenerated the webpages. Ahh, back under a megabyte for the folder of images, thumbnail images, and webpage files. I hope you enjoy them. The final basement inspection is tomorrow morning.

Note to self: In case I ever need to strip the camera data out of the image files again, here's the tiny script I whipped out:

#!/bin/bash
for i in $( ls *.jpg ); do
 jpegtran -copy none -outfile lite$i $i
# and if I'm brave uncomment the next line to replace
# the original file with the new "lite" version
# mv lite$i $i
done