README for diy-archives-tools
Shane Landrum <[email protected]>
Version 0.2, last updated March 12, 2010

The scripts contained here are miscellaneous bits of hackery I use to maintain my personal
collection of archival-material photos, as described in this conference paper:

  http://cliotropic.org/blog/talks/camera-laptop-and-what-else/

Right now, there's not much here and it's not well-documented because I'm busy writing a 
dissertation. If you modify and improve these, I'd love to hear more about your work.

I can't guarantee these are bug-free; use at your own risk, and you should probably know
your way around AppleScript too. If you're confused about how they work, I'd welcome comments, 
bug reports, or contributions of code and documentation:
  
  http://github.com/cliotropic/diy-archives-tools/issues

CONTENTS:

- image_scalers/ (folder)
   Automator actions to rotate and scale images. Slower than ImageMagick on the
   command line, but easier to understand what they're doing.

- imageFiler.scpt
   AppleScript to file images into folders. You'll need to edit this to point to
   your own preferred image folder before using it, and you should probably be familiar with
   AppleScript and bash shell scripting to understand what else it does.

(I use these scripts from the Scripts menu in OS X. If you want to do this, you'll need to copy
them manually to ~/Library/Scripts.)

- rename incoming image files.hazelrules
   A set of rules for Hazel ( http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php ) which will rename your image
   files in ways that preserve their original time/date stamps and name order. This is an important
   part of using the current imageFiler.  (I use Hazel because I don't like to mess with cron; 
   skilled commandline users could write a shell script that would do the same work.)

- PDF from these images.workflow
   An Automator workflow to take a set of selected images (in the Finder) and turn them into a PDF.
   You'll need to customize this by adding a custom Quartz filter that compresses the file with
   JPEG compression, as described here:
     
     http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031106133852693
     http://mactoids.com/create-a-quartz-filter-with-colorsync/
     
   Once you do that, change the name of the filter in the "Apply Quartz Filter to PDF Documents"
   step to the name of the new filter you created. (If you don't do this step, your PDF files
   will end up *very* large.) You may also want to change the name and location of the resulting 
   PDF file, which will be created by default on the Desktop. 
   
   (This whole process would be more flexible if implemented in Applescript; this was just a 
   quick hack to solve the problem at a basic level.)