watchDirectory Help > Plugins > Photography Automation
Photography Automation
This page gives you some hints how to automate your workflow with watchDirectory.
These tips assume all your photography work is done inside sub-directories of C:\Pictures.
Your original pictures from your camera are inside sub-directories of C:\Pictures\Original.
For example all pictures of the wedding you photographed are stored inside C:\Pictures\Original\Wedding.
Small thumbnails for these pictures are created inside corresponding sub-directories of C:\Pictures\Thumbnails.
So, the thumbnails for the wedding are in the directory C:\Pictures\Thumbnails\Wedding (this Wedding directory
can be created automatically by the thumbnail plugin).
These thumbnail directories will also contain the HTML that is created by watchDirectory.
Bigger thumbnails, to show when people click a small thumbnail, are stored inside corresponding sub-directories
of C:\Pictures\BigThumb.
Below is an outline of this setup:
C:\Pictures (empty, except for sub-directories) C:\Pictures\Original (empty, except for sub-directories) C:\Pictures\Original\Wedding (this dir contains all pictures from your sisters wedding) C:\Pictures\BigThumb (empty, except for sub-directories) C:\Pictures\BigThumb\Wedding (the large thumbnails of the wedding) C:\Pictures\Thumbnails (empty, except for sub-directories) C:\Pictures\Thumbnails\Wedding (small thumbnails and generated html)
Other setups are possible, but make sure you do not store thumbnails "below" the same directory as your original pictures (or vice versa), as that will make your watchDirectory setup a lot more complicated.
Automatically Create Thumbnails
Create the large thumbnails first
You can use the Automatically Create Thumbnails plugin
to create thumbnails for all new pictures that are created inside C:\Pictures\Original, select the option to also
monitor sub-directories of C:\Pictures\Original.
Set the target directory, where thumbnails are placed, to C:\Pictures\BigThumb.
Make sure the thumbnails are created rather big (width * height) as these will be the "target" for when people
click the small thumbnails.
Check the option to place the thumbnails inside corresponding subdirectories.
The effect will be that the thumbnail of C:\Pictures\Original\Wedding\DSC1234.JPG is placed in the directory
C:\Pictures\BigThumb\Wedding. The Wedding sub-directory is automatically created by the plugin.
Create the small thumbnails
Create a second "thumbnail task" to monitor the directory C:\Pictures\BigThumb. As the
pictures inside the BigThumb directory are already rotated, do not select those options again.
Set the target directory, where thumbnails are placed, to C:\Pictures\Thumbnails,
and also set the option to create them inside corresponding sub-directories.
These small thumbnails are meant to be shown on HTML pages, so people can click on them and look at the
corresponding BigThumb thumbnail. Make sure the small thumbnails are small enough for when the HTML plugin
creates the overview pages.