solutions wanted Lowres pictures for printing

[bens]

Does anybody know of a way/extension to create lowres pictures (72-100 dpi) out of highres pictures in filemaker. I have a few customers who download highres pictures from the web with 360 works,and now i have a customes who asks if he can get lowres pictures, for printing from the highres pictures.

I have about 12000 pictures.

It would be nice if the printing lowres is created automatically, and also deleted when the highres is deleted.

[jamesducker]

I think there is a Troi plugin that does this, my colleague was talking about it the other day, if I remember I will ask him.

If that doesn't work for you, then I would suggest (as you are using a mac) that you do it with ImageMagick. It is free, but a bit fiddly to install (Google helps). Once installed you can call ImageMagick from the Mac OS command line, which can also be done from FileMaker using 'Perform AppleScript' ["do shell script..."].

Hope that points you in at least one helpful direction! I've subscribed to this topic so please reply if you get stuck.

Cheers

James

[bens]

Thanks for the reply

I will ask the troi people, how it can be made.

I also wondered if there is a better way than 360 works for downloading files from the web with filemaker ?

Now i have to share the same folder with the images on my lan and also in my dmz zone for the webusers. Maybe there is a tool who can pick up the images from the the lan side when they are wanted by the webusers for download.

[jamesducker]

As you are on a Mac I would probably use the command-line tool CURL (which is built in to Mac OS X) to retrieve files from the web.

For passing files around between internal and external users, you could set it all up in FileMaker:

1) user on the OUTSIDE requests a file; this creates a record in a 'file requests' table

2) an unattended FileMaker Pro machine on the INSIDE is constantly running a script looking for new records in this 'file requests' table. It loops through each of those records and goes to the file server, finds the correct file and does 'insert file' in to a container field.

3) user on the OUTSIDE then sees that their 'file request' record now has a file attached to it (in the container field). They press a 'download' button which does 'export field contents' which deposits the file out of FileMaker and on to the user's desktop, and then (to stop the database getting enormous) sets the container field to "".

That way, your outside users need access only to FileMaker, not to the file server.

You'd have to be a bit careful with this approach, as the database size would constantly be getting bigger and smaller. Do lots of regular/automatic file-compacting maintenance stuff.

Alternatively you could use 360Works SuperContainer to do much the same thing but keep all the files out of the database, but personally I find it a nuisance to set up and use so would probably do as I described above.

Cheers

James

[Fenton]

On Macs there is a also simple image processing built in, which you can run in the background via AppleScript (which you can run from FileMaker). The two tools are the Image Events application and the command line tool sips. I think they do pretty much the same things. There are several examples on the Apple site, AppleScript section, with examples of how to use Image Events.

While you can't change the resolution directly with these tools (AFAIK), you can save the original file as another format, such as JPEG (smallest likely) or PNG, and you can scale the image, to either a proportion "maximum side size", or to a percentage scale.

I imagine ImageMagic can do quite a bit more. There is also the inexpensive GraphicConverter application, which has substantial AppleScript support. Though it is not a "background processing" app.

By combining curl (download to a temporary folder) with sips (convert) with lpr (print) you can run it all "transparent to the user" (I've always wanted to say that -)

[bens]

Again thanks for the reply

This part i don't understand "with lpr (print)"

Why this part ?

[Fenton]

It's just a command line command tool to print. You mentioned printing in your first post. But ignore it, if you don't need to print right then.