Digital image post processing: Question on adding data to a photo

[bennyboy]

I've got some experience in doing stuff like this.  Photoshop has macros, or it's actually fairly easy just to write a Windows program that will do this.  It should be trivially simple to add a text box to an existing image.  I might be coerced into helping, actually, since it sounds like an important project.

My first question would be-- where is the data coming from?  Are you entering it by hand on a per item basis?  Is the data already in a spreadsheet or database, and you are just adding the images to match?  Are the numbers sequential (in which case you could generate the complete list auomatically in Excel, save it to a file, and use a dropdown menu to just pick which ID goes with which image)?  Are the images all the same size and orientation?

With 1200 items, I'd definitely recommend spending some time getting the exact right tool for your process, because that's a lot of elbow grease you're talking about there.

After looking at some of the tools yesterday I think this is probably the way to go. It is kind of what I had in mind to begin with. I'm just not a Photoshop kinda guy so I don't know how to pull it off. Neither does the museum technician we hired for the project. As far as coercing goes I could probably pay you to consult if you are interested. I just need to make sure that wouldn't be a problem first since this is a for the government. I wouldn't want to get in trouble with Girly for hiring a North Korean spy to insert fractals into the JPG's that upload a virus into the Park Service server that burns down the Smithsonian. My available budget isn't unlimited though...

There is a spreadsheet, and we are adding images to match. The numbers are for the most part sequential, but the photos will not be taken in order since the items are randomly located in four different locations. The customer also already has photos of about 90 of the 1258 objects. These will not need to be photographed again, but the accession numbers for these objects aren't sequencial. There are columns in the spreadsheet for accession number, inventory date and item condition among others. The text we need to insert is the accession number and the inventory date. It might be nice if we could embed the item condition in the exif (my new word of the day yesterday) data too, but that is just an idea, not a requirement. What I see in my mind goes go something like this:

1. Complete the inventory (A lot of this is already done)
2. Photograph the objects (this won't start until after the first of the year)
2a. The images will be captured in NEF (Nikon RAW) and JPG
2b. We can at this point name (rename) the photos manually to match the accession number if there isn't an easy way to do that later in the process
3. Batch convert the NEF images to TIFF (rename the images if we didn't do that earlier)
4. Insert the watermarks and edit the exif data
5. Batch convert the TIFF images to JPG (the deliverable is both formats, edited and unedited)
6. Profit???

If you are interested in consulting let me know, and we'll talk offline. I see your part as developing the macro and showing Becca and/or me how to use it.

It sounds like an interesting project.  I don't think Photoshop is the right tool for this job-- straight-up Windows programming should be much better, because it allows for complete control.

As for security, probably the easiest way around that would be for me to provide source code along with the executable.  Then it can pretty easily be determined that there's nothing fishy going on.  To be honest, I don't think the whole project will need more than a couple hundred lines of code.

I also use images at work (pictures for making test questions for English), so I can benefit later by my work on this project.