runaway bride, the photostory

In the sunny July, girls waiting for a Wedding are taking a coffee break.


See the fotostory: the runaway bride on flickr

New photos, new life

Da RomaGennaio2009

Hi all, just to let you know I've put together some nice (hopefully) fine art prints using my photos and some photoshop retouch. Enjoy, if applicable - of course.

Grabbing stock prices from yahoo finance

This time I've published a little script to grab stock price series from yahoo finance. Perhaps it is useful as sample.

A left-brain week, this.

Water flows (IMG_5163)
Originally uploaded by gpciceri.

I was very busy using the other side of my brain, so no update this week. Fortunately, I just discovered ClustrMaps, that has two almost interesting features:

• Clustr is to Flickr like cluster is to flicker


• ClustrMaps is a WikiName in its nature

Of course, it is simply one of the most intelligent system to track site visits I ever seen, but you can check this on yourself.

And the winner is... (writing IPTC metadata into a jpeg)

IMG_5120.JPG
Originally uploaded by gpciceri.

Yes, I've experimented a little, but at least I'm able to annotate my pictures with the EXIF/IPTC metadata that dreamstime's upload system tries to read when you sumbit a photo - all of this without opening each photo by hand but using a batch procedure (thanks to Imagemagick's mogrify utility).

First of all the metadata: save them in a file named ./iptc.txt .

8BIM#1028="IPTC"
2#0="�"
2#120#Caption="I went to California - and nothing has been the same"
2#80#Byline="gpciceri"
2#5#Image Name="After a trip in San Francisco, photo num: %s"
2#25#Keyword="california"
2#25#Keyword="san francisco"

The meaning of these fields are obvious, isn't it ?

And then the python script that rules it all (courtesy of my left brain):

import glob, subprocess, tempfile, os

IPTC='./iptc.txt'
files = glob.glob('./*.JPG')

ipct=open(IPTC,"r").read()
for file in files:
    name = file.split('.JPG')[0].split('_')[1]
    title = ipct % (name,)
    outf = tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile()
    outf.write(title)
    outf.flush()
    print "processing:", file, name
    p=subprocess.Popen("mogrify -profile 8BIMTEXT:" +       outf.name + " " + file, shell=True)
    sts = os.waitpid(p.pid, 0)

It reads the metadata to add from the previous file, cycles over the *.JPG file in the current directory, substitutes the image number in the image name and mogrify the file - writing the metadata into it. Et voilà.

Ready for iStockphoto.com!!! (Pier fuga)

Pier fuga
Originally uploaded by gpciceri.

Well, iStockphoto staff has just reviewed my three samples and decided I'm ready to post my photos on their site. Here's the beef:
'''
Dear gian paolo (gpciceri),
Welcome to iStockphoto.com, the designer's dirty little secret. Congratulations, the iStockphoto administrators have determined that your images are commercially and technically ready for iStockphoto.com. Please begin uploading at your convenience.
'''
Here's my page on iStockphoto.com.

My first slide show

OK. This is my first attempt to create a slide show on slide.com: well, the slide uploader is not so clever as the flicker one - for example I've found no way to control how many files, and which, are still waiting to upload, neither the way to suspend/resume an upload. Nevertheless the resulting flash-driven slidshow is rather interesting. Even the HTML mock-up slide.com suggests me it's poor (way too big, and unrespectful of the flowpage for my blog style) - I've tweaked the flicker one to handle the slideshow.