HawthorneVillager.com

Hey everyone,

OK, so at work I have created this massive picture bank - basically a picture of every employee. I need to process each pic, and make the same size avatar for everyone, focusing on their faces. Then take the batch, and ensure each picture has a name attached to it. Then ultimately, when we mention people's names in presentations, communications, etc... the picture & name has to be displayed.

The problem is, we have taken hundreds of pictures - all in various sizes, poses, angles, etc.. Then we manually have to crop everyone, and resize each pic as neede (some are closeups and some are not). Then when we put the pic into powerpoint, we need to play around with it again, then add a name, a frame around it, then add animations to each part (or group them then add animations), and then sequence the animations... you get the point

Does anyone know of a software program where we can:
1) upload pics of people (approx 300-350)
2) it processes the entire batch to the same size and dimensions (possibly smart enough to focus on the facial area)
3) Have the ability to add names to each
4) spit out a virtual pic card (pic/name all as 1 image)
this way when we need to add a pic to powerpoint - it's copy, paste the avatar w/name, add animation

any ideas??? any solutions?

I actually wrote something like that several years ago for my picture database of houses.

Only thing it won't/didn't do is find a face in the frame.

It loaded the picture into a database, scaled it to different sizes, overlayed a lot number and then stuffed all that into a database.

I scripted it in Perl with a few helper programs such as Image::Info and PNM utilities and ran it under FreeBSD.

In the old old days we'd script that on an Amiga using ARexx and The Art Department.. but you really don't want to do that now.

These days I'm not sure what I could even recommend on a Windows platform.

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I think you should consider XnView and IDimager. IDimager is not free, but has very good features and is scriptable. XnView is free, good for batch processing, but does not have catalogue management capabilities.

http://www.idimager.com/
http://www.xnview.com/

Shouaib

I know this is probably not the solution you're looking for but, iPhoto for Mac has a faces feature. Basically it detects faces and you can label them with the appropriate name. You can search through all the names individually, or you can create smart albums and specify multiple names and they'll automatically get put into that album. You can crop the pictures in iPhoto as well, but I haven't looked into batch cropping just of the faces.

Google's Picasa does that too .. and it's free

I didn't pay for iPhoto either, it came with my Mac.