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I decided to make some changes to my image workflow.

I posted previously that I wrote some scripts that’d generate thumbnails, upload them to my webserver and index my database with them. The script is run in a directory that contains the images to upload – which required that I watermark them during my post-processing. This isn’t that difficult since I’ve written a bunch of PhotoShop actions to do it, but it limits the resultant image since they’re all watermarked and it’s just one more step that I need to perform on countless images.

I rewrote the main script that generates the thumbnails. It used to use PHP+GD. Now I’m just using ImageMagick via the command line. That’s handy by itself – but the really useful part is that I’m also using ImageMagick to watermark the images that will be uploaded (and leaving the original source images untouched). This is nothing but good news for me.

Plus, the resultant watermark is a lot prettier than the ones that I was throwing on before (mostly due to my amateur PhotoShop skills, I’d imagine).

The components that upload the images (just a looped scp statement) and update the database (a very small PHP script) remain the same from the original implementation.

I’m sure most people reading this won’t find this interesting even in the slightest… but I find it neat and I’m excited about streamlining my workflow.