Like many others, I have noticed that Facebook increased its photo size from 604 to 720 pixels. At the same time, I noticed that the commands in my last post weren’t perfect. I have tried to write an improved script:

• facebook.sh

Simply run it in your photos folder and it will make a ‘facebook’ directory to which it copies your processed photos. By default, it only handles the photos in the current directory. To make it recursive (it will skip the ‘facebook’ dir), just remove or edit “-maxdepth 1″.

As before, I can recommend ImageMagick and Cygwin if you are a Windows user.

Shouldn’t have to mention it, but: Use at your own risk.

All of these developments are really exciting, but I am not totally satisfied. For one thing, you have to choose and stick to one particular browser. Also, they do not sync everything that I would like (e.g. Greasemonkey scripts). A blog post about alternatives to Mozilla’s Ubiquity introduced me to some great projects, and inspired me to start using Quix. Quix lets you access your bookmarks, custom searches, and other tools, from one place. It works across all browsers and doesn’t need to be installed!

Not long after, however, I decided to not depend on Quix at all, and write a free, open version. While Quix lets you write your own command file, I also let you modify and store the code. This way, you don’t have to worry about Quix crashing, going bankrupt, or eavesdropping on your traffic. You just have to host one JavaScript file (or use mine) and remember its address.

Clicking the following image invokes the script: 

Drag it to your browser’s toolbar for convenience. Alter the web address in the link if you want to use your own copy or modified version. The file: WebOsCmd.js

LinkSave.net provides a text box where you can paste the URL and generate a link you can right click and “Save As…”. But do you want LinkSave to know all the links you save?

I created a similar link generator where your URLs are not logged. The link is created on the client side using JavaScript, and you can view the source code to be sure. Easier than writing a new HTML file with the URL every time you want to save a file. Of course, wget is an alternative.

A few tips for using Facebook and/or other services. You will need ImageMagick and linux or Cygwin.

Order images correctly

Copying images to your computer, or rotating them, may ruin the files’ time (of last modification). If your album contains images from several cameras, the file names can’t be used to sort the images either. The following command renames the files to the second they were taken (see Exif).

c=0;for i in *.jpg;do t=`identify -verbose $i |egrep 'Exif:DateTime:'|sed 's/[^0-9]//g'`; mv $i "$t-$c.jpg";c=$[ $c + 1 ];echo $i;done

Remove excess information

Be sure you don’t share more than you mean to! Also, saves you a couple of bytes to upload. (Copy files to a new folder first.)

for i in *.jpg;do mogrify -strip -resize 604x604 $i;echo $i;done

Of course, for some services, keeping the metadata could be useful.

Anonymize file names

Finally, you may want to rename the album file names:

c=0;for i in *.jpg;do f=`printf "%04u" "$c"`;mv $i $f.jpg;c=$[ $c + 1 ];done