Regular readers of this blog might have noticed, that lately most entries come with an image. Some might have even gone so far to click on one of them, to see the enlarged version. When did I start adding images regularily? Since I've discovered CMFPhoto and EasyCrop (link into frame!), that's when.

And since I still haven't written that homage/review of XMLMind Editor I thought, today I'll tell you, how I've set up my image publishing workflow. Who knows? Somebody might find it useful...

EasyCrop is one of those tools that do one thing and do that well. It's best thought of as throughfare for your images:

Drag any image (even directly from a webpage!) onto its edit window or take a snapshot (screen, timed screen, window or selection) and you're ready to go. Want the whole image? Hit Command-A. Want to crop? drag the selection. You can rotate and scale. The result is updated live in the right section of the window.

Type a name and then (this is really neat) simply drag the right image onto the next application. You'll have to try it for yourself. It's at least twice as good, as it sounds ;-)

In my case I simply drag the image onto my ftp client, where it instantly gets uploaded to this site. Here, I have created an PhotoAlbum, which behaves like an ordinary Zope folder, i.e. I can upload to it via ftp or WebDAV and access it via the web. The neat part is, though, that it can perform server-side, on-demand image-resizing. I.e. in the blog entries I usually reference the images (such as the screenshot above) like so <img src="/images/blog/EasyCropInAction/variant/small />", which gives these 320 pixel wide versions you can see everywhere on this page. If I feel lucky, I wrap a <a href="/images/blog/EasyCropInAction"> around it and voila!

And coming up: a little review of HyperEdit, my tool of choice for writing little XHTML-snippets, such as these entries. So, hang around, if you like...