Image APIs

I have the opportunity to take lots and lots of pictures these days and share them with family and friends. You can guess why, but I am reluctant to be as open with my private life as say KC and David. Anyhow I decided to create a photoblog for our relatives to keep up to date and allow uploading and automatic conversion of my large jpegs to a more web appropriate size and even to thumbnails. I had been using a very nice command-line utility convert.exe which is a part of the ImageMagick toolkit to resize image after the upload. Much nicer than manually converting each one in Digital Image Pro. Digital Image is handy by the way. Very nice for image touch-ups, smart erase and printing. Would love to see VBA inside that tool for automating repetitive tasks. Anyhow, in doing this and talking with some of the digital photogs in my group I learned about EXIF and the metadata therein, including to my surprise, an actual thumbnail embedded in the file. I then remembered Omar Shahine had an entry about a tool he'd built - JPEG Hammer - and I decided to take a look at that as well as his GotDotNet workspace to see how he was creating thumbnails. Finally, revelation. I found Image.GetThumbnailImage and Graphics.DrawImage methods in System.Drawing. I love this. Now I have the happy task of rewriting to remove an external dependency.