Abby and Win’s Blog

After weeks of arranging and uploading, I’ve finally finished all the pictures taken by our photographer during our wedding last month. Ariel Javelosa was the company who shot our prenup pics and the wedding pics. I was impressed by their professionalism and punctuality. Unfortunately, out of the 4 cameras used at least one had the date/time-stamp mis-configured. This made it hard to arrange the pictures in chronological order. I tried my best to remember the order of events. Here’s what I did using my Mac.

1. Import all of the pictures off the CDs and create an album in iPhoto.
2. Select View => Sort Photos => Manually. You can now drag the photos around and arrange them the way you want.
3. Select all the photos (Apple + A). Select Photos => Batch Change.
4. Set = Date. Then put the date and time you want the first photo to have. Then I added 10 seconds between each photo so that the order stays the same. Each photo’s time will be different by 10 seconds. I checked the Modify original files and clicked OK.
5. If the title isn’t displaying, you can display it by selecting View => Titles.
6. Select all the photos (Apple + A). Select Photos => Batch Change.
7. Set = Title, to = Date/Time. Select Include Date: and select Short. Select Include Time, 12-hour clock, and select Show Seconds. Click OK.
8. Make sure everything is still in order. Select View => Sort Photos => By Date. Make sure Ascending is checked.
9. Create a folder on you Desktop.
10. Select all of the photos in iPhoto then export. Select File => Export. Select the File Export tab. Select Current under Kind. Select Use title under File Name. Then click on Export.
11. Navigate to the folder you made on your Desktop.
12. Once finished open the folder and you will notice that the file names are now the date/time-stamp you changed it to using iPhoto and the order stayed the same (assuming that folder orders the files by filename).

That’s all in iPhoto. You can now use Automator to rename the files to whatever you want. It only takes 2 Actions in Automator.

1. Get Specified Finder Items. This is where you drag the files over.
2. Rename Finder Items. The first drop down select Make Sequential. Then new name: DSC_. Place number after name. Start number at 0001. Separated by nothing. Check the Make all numbers with the value of 4.
3. Run it and you’re done. The files should be renamed something like DSC_0001.jpg and it’s incremented by 1 for every file.

You can name it whatever you want. I then uploaded it onto my Phanfare account and 2 weeks later I’m done. Keep in mind that the Exif data wasn’t changed just the image property. Hope this helps anyone out there. It was an adventure trying to solve this problem - which could have been avoided if the camera date/time-stamp setting was configured properly.

You can see our pics at http://abbyandwin.phanfare.com. There’s 5 albums since I’m only able to have 500 pics each album.

Update: Phanfare has notified me that I can have more than 500 pictures in an album but am limited to 500 pictures in a section within an album. They were kind enough to email me a link on how to rearrange it. So now I have just 1 album broken down into 5 sections. Thanks Phanfare!

While preparing for our wedding next month, I decided that it’s time for new digital camera. I wanted a digital SLR at first but I’m a novice photographer. I won’t be using the camera’s full potential. I didn’t want another point and shoot camera. So I went with what’s in between. The first camera I looked at and have been wanting is the Canon PowerShot S5 IS. It has 8MP and 12x optical zoom. It uses the Digic III processor. This is the camera my brother in law, Al is using. It takes great pictures. The only thing I didn’t like personally was the 4 AA batteries. Where’s the rechargeable battery Canon?A couple of weeks ago I was about to ignore the AA batteries and buy it once and for all.

Then I see the PowerShot G9. It has 12MP, 6x optical zoom, and has RAW support just to name a few features. It uses rechargeable batteries (which I’ve been looking for) and it’s also smaller in size compared to the S5. The camera can also use SDHC memory cards.I’ve only had the camera a couple of weeks and have been taking pics left and right. I recently ordered a lens adapter from Lensmate. This adapter will allow me to use lenses and filters. I hope to get my order soon. The other night I took some pics in the backyard. It was very bright. Here’s some pics I took with different settings.

All 4 pics were taken in the same area minutes apart. I love how I can adjust the lens speed and take a picture of a dark area and make it bright.

I’ve already taken some RAW pics. They are about 12MB per pic. Pretty large files and with the new patch for Leopard, 10.5.2, I’m able to view the RAW files with Preview. Unlike before the patch, Photoshop CS3 was the only app I can use to view it.

By the way, half of the pics taken at our wedding shower at work were taken with my G9, if you want to see more samples. The other half were taken with my co-worker’s Canon Rebel 400d XTi digital SLR (yummy!).