Moved to WordPress on mustard.net

Nobody reads this, but I've moved my blog to http://furryfamily.mustard.net/blog.

Obsessive Compulsive Trying to Make a Photobook

I know it. I'm totally obsessive compulsive. I'm trying to make a photobook for Christmas presents. I'm so excited that I only have to spend $40 on one gift but that's another story. So far I've made photobooks from a few different services, and I am using blurb.com right now not only cause their website is cute... I mean I like shutterfly's logo, too. But it seemed that a desktop client rather than a web client would be much faster and it is. If I weren't so OC.

So my workflow for making a photobook whether it's online like photoworks.com or desktop-side like blurb is as follows:

0. go through every hard drive Scott has owned in the past year searching for pictures
1. layout pre-book with selected pictures
2. gather all pictures in one place and photoshop them (redeye, exposure, color schemes for pics on same page or facing pages, etc)
3. start a new book and import all pictures
4. layout new book with correct number of pictures per page
5. put pictures in order
6. click auto-fill or auto-flow or whatever marketing decided to call it

I know. I basically make the whole book twice, but I it makes me feel better. Right now, I'm totally stuck. I just got Photoshop Elements 5 thinking I might actually try to do a good job with the photoshopping.

I've always used Picasa to go through my photos since it's free, but Elements has its own organizer. And I have to admit, it has some really nice features - editor integration, wysiwyg thumbnails, version stacks, and lastly tags! But still, I'm totally stumped. I imported over 5000 pictures. I loved the idea of tagging and the many-to-many relationship so I started tagging all sorts of people, family, and friends. I've probably spent at least 4 hours tagging and I'm not nearly done. But I decided I should move on to the next step and start gathering only the pictures I have decided will go in my photobook (I've already completed step one: making my pre-book book). I could tag forever.

I couldn't find any of the pictures I wanted. I thought maybe it was because I am just not familiar with a new interface, but I gave it a good hour to locate about half the pictures from my pre-book I printed on my crap printer. A total nightmare. First off, viewing only one tag at a time brings up all pictures with that tag regardless of any other tags a picture may or may not have, there is no such thing as all pictures with this tag and only this tag. I went to look for pictures of Scott and me by viewing the Scott tag and the Jess tag, and I got nearly 700 hits. Crap.

And then I went to scroll. I arranged by date and guessed at the month a given picture I was looking for might have been taken in. The date bar at the top of the Elements organizer doesn't have months written, only years and months in the tool-tip. Not a nice mouse-over, but a standard windows tool-tip that takes 5 seconds to trigger. It was all just scrolling through a mush of thousands of pictures. I'm scrolling along looking for my picture and then I look up and find that I've scrolled into six months later. Totally confusing.

I've finally given up. I realized what it is that makes Picasa just make sense - folders organized by date rather than pictures organized by date. Trying to manage each and every picture individually is just way too psycho low level. I hate to say is but Google is a genius. Either that or Google has better psychologists than Adobe. Folders organized by the date of the most recent photo contained just makes sense.

Well, and then there's the nice headers so you can visually see where you are when you're scrolling and the flat or simplified tree view for navigation. The folder tree view in Elements just pisses me off. Any ten year old could write that in VB. Shit I could. It lists every directory on your hard drive rather than only the folders that contain pictures much less imported pictures. Sure you get more information and you can right-click any folder to import it, but it's clutter when you're focused on looking at your pictures. Folder management belongs elsewhere. Sigh.

That was a really long rant and I with I didn't just stay up all night fucking around with the Adobe stuff when I should have just stuck with Picasa. Adobe should stick with what they're good at - the editor.