Practical Mac / Glenn Fleishman
Wedding-photo project baffles expert

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You would think a technology writer who regularly professes his knowledge of all things digital could create a Web site containing the photographs from his wedding in fewer than 19 months.

You'd be wrong.

It often matters less how much you know than the utility of the tools you have.

My wife and I decided against hiring a wedding photographer for our Port Townsend event, as we weren't interested in formal portraiture, and several wedding guests were professional or serious amateur photographers who had volunteered to take pictures.

We set up a digital transfer station at the reception, and one of my good friends and colleagues helped move over a few hundred images taken up until that point on a dozen cameras.

A Port Townsend sushi chef, yurt builder and (coincidentally) wedding photographer we met that weekend spontaneously volunteered his bulb-release gear and helped guests to take black-and-white photos of themselves. These photographs were scanned at high resolution from film negatives at Prolab in Seattle (www.digitalimaging.com).

Later, guests sent us prints, too. I purchased an HP ScanJet 5500c because it had a full flatbed but also could automatically feed 4-by-6-inch prints. A few hundred more photos were digitized this way.

Now my travails began. I had failed to consider two related problems: sorting and editing. Because photos had been taken by many people across the same period of time, I would need to order photographs chronologically so that the same events from different perspectives would appear consecutively.

And not every photograph was a gem, although a relatively high percentage were above average. Thus I needed to edit the selection of about 1,200 photographs to something more manageable.

Some of our unofficial camera hounds used the professional photographers' best and most poorly known technique: take many photos of the same scene and discard all but the good ones. I had to choose among many alternatives of the same person or time slice.
 
My first stab at editing and sorting was to try iPhoto, then in its initial version (www.apple.com/iphoto). Unfortunately, it wasn't up to the task. I gave up temporarily, in hopes that iPhoto 2 would solve the problem.

It did not. iPhoto 2 also was too slow, too crash-prone and too limited, including its great difficulties in moving the order of photographs within albums. Another flaw: the short digital-camera movie files and some file types I was using couldn't be read in iPhoto, making it harder to build the Web site I was hoping for.

Instead of waiting for progress on iPhoto, I turned to iView Media Pro from iView Multimedia (www.iview-multimedia.com). It's a sophisticated but pricey ($160) media-management tool that might be out of the reach of all but the most serious photographers and videographers.

iView Media Pro creates catalogs of media files that work by reference. It creates a thumbnail and extracts technical details from a file and then points to wherever that file is on a local or mounted hard drive; it doesn't move or copy the referenced file. iPhoto, by contrast, must copy photos into its own library for you to work with them. It also can easily create Web galleries.

I was once again thwarted, however. Because of flaws in the version of iView Media Pro available at the time, I couldn't reliably edit and order. Some time passed. I grew older. My wife grew used to the notion that our photos might never appear online.

Over this past Christmas spent at my in-laws, however, I acquainted myself with iView's version 2 release, which protected me from myself. I finally had order!

The Batch Rename feature in iView allows you to rename the original photographs you reference with new names and sequential numbers. Once I had a set order of the photographs in the catalog, I renamed them in that order to preserve them in the files' names.

The final step was uploading. While I have yet to create pure Web galleries hosted on my own Web site, I chose to start with an online photo service.

My wife and I have used Ofoto (www.ofoto.com) and Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com) extensively and prefer the latter's slightly better interface and slightly cheaper quantity prices for 4-by-6 prints (as low as 25 cents) compared with Ofoto's flat 29-cent price. Both services offer equal quality and rapid turnaround. First-class shipping runs from 5 to 15 cents a print, depending on quantity.

Shutterfly, however, allows those you share your albums with to view images without creating an account; Ofoto requires a simple account creation before viewing shared albums. I spent hours uploading the hundreds of megabytes of images, but Shutterfly lets you send them a CD-R (nonreturnable) with images labeled in the right format, too.

The photos are up. The happy memories have returned. And I can finally check off the last item from the wedding "to-do" list.

Glenn Fleishman writes the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to gfleishman@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists

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