About a year ago I bought myself a new camera (a Sony DSLR–A100) and it’s been a joy to use.
I had my sights on it for a few months, but it took me a long time to really convince myself to actually buy the camera. It’s not exactly cheap, but with a special price (100 euros cashback) and Fnac’s member day 10%, I managed to pick it up for quite a bit less than it was listed. Together with a 2GB Sandisk Extreme III Compact Flash card, I can snap away to my hearts content. Even with a 10 megapixel CCD it’s hard to fill up a card like that in a few goes. If you use RAW ofcourse, it’ll fill up easely !
As I said, the camera delivers great pictures, but each picture is 10 megapixels, jpeg fine (I keep away from RAW for the moment) and between 2 and 3 MB big. While this is fine, I want to keep my iPhoto collection snappy and use my hard disk for more than just my photo-collection. But at the same time I want to keep those originals stored away safely in case I want to edit them or print a huge poster of my children.
Aperture was out of the question, too expensive. So for now I’m using my own little manual workflow, using
- Image Capture to get the picture from my camera and store them in a To-Process directory,
- launch a bash script file that resizes each picture to 50% original and move the resulting files to another directory
- and I then insert them in iPhoto.
The batch script file works wonderful, using ImageMagick, but I’ve been trying to use Automator to string the workflow together, but I can’t seem to get it to launch the bash script file correctly.
For now, I’m continuing doing this manually, until I either find out how to do this or give in and buy Aperture…