Nick

proposal: a photo planning app that will show where the sun's gonna be, like Sun Surveyor, but ALSO will tell you when street cleaning is so people have to move their cars

• What do folks use for doing things like diptychs and triptychs? I don't need to do anything sophisticated or complex, just check a couple photos in a box and have them be aligned
• Do folks have an open source or pay-once app they like a lot that is good at resizing images to specific file size target?

Open source or pay once things plz

For the resizing question, RIOT ("Radical Image Optimization Tool") seems to be a reasonably functional GUI option as a standalone tool for resizing an image to a target size, such as the Cohost plus 10mb limit.

Why would I want this? With DXO, tiny tweaks in my output settings tended to result in huge swings in jpeg file size (e.g., 3mb vs 15mb), on top of the fact that I regularly work on batches of files from different cameras with significantly different crops, meaning that the baseline file sizes within a group of photos could be all over the place. Now, is there a meaningful difference between the 3mb and the 15mb file for posting the photos from my shitty little walks on cohost? Absolutely not, but it was making my brain itch.

RIOT isn't particularly fast; apparently the way you find out what compression settings will yield the desired file size is that you just...keep trying various settings until you get a close enough result? I guess? But it has a batch mode, so you can just let it do its thing and make a cup of tea.

(I'm sure for the more command line-pilled amongst us, this can be easily done using imagemagick...)

Other than my STRONG lack of desire to deal with driver troubleshooting and so forth, my biggest sticking point re: going to an open source operating system at this juncture is photo processing.

I use DXO Photolab because I have been a hardline appreciator of Nik Software's Control Point user interface for making local adjustments ever since the days when Nikon (no relation) used to put it in Capture NX. That tech was sold to Google who put it in Snapseed, which continues to rule, and then Google sold it to DXO, who put it in Photolab, while also packaging it for use with Adobe products in plugin form.

Control points are the ideal form of photographic local edit, because they let you quickly target areas of similar exposure/contrast/etc. and make adjustments to them. It's a lot like a souped up version of split grade dodging and burning in the darkroom. It's faster and more painless than other methods of masking for making photographic corrections.

DXO also excels in noise reduction and I really like their color tweaking tool as well.

From casual googling it doesn't seem like DXO is one of those pieces of software that you can just run using wine. And I know there are open source Lightroom alternatives out there, but I feel like the ones I've poked were very much like 70-80% of Lightroom, and at this point I would be upset at going back to even 100% of Lightroom.

So it feels like I'm very much stuck on the "live with windows or switch back to OSX" boat, alas.

• What do folks use for doing things like diptychs and triptychs? I don't need to do anything sophisticated or complex, just check a couple photos in a box and have them be aligned
• Do folks have an open source or pay-once app they like a lot that is good at resizing images to specific file size target?

Open source or pay once things plz