dCam
Download the beta
What is it?
dCam is a program I ultimately wrote for myself. As a digital camera owner, I realized that there was no software that did what I wanted to do with my digital camera; specifically -
- Put picures on web pages in a hurry
- Attach comments to my pictures
- Do a decent slide show
- Make movies out of my pictures for archiving or sending to the technically challenged
- Make time lapses
- Put icons on my pictures so I don't have to guess which picture was which
So, how do you use it?
dCam is designed around how most digital cameras capture pictures - to folders on a disk somewhere. My particular camera puts them on a PCMCIA card that I mount and copy to my hard drive. Once you have a folder of images to deal with, you launch dCam. First you see the three areas that dCam can help with.
When you write your own program, you can put your dogs in it too.
To compose web pages from your pictures, click on the Web Pages picture. Yes, I know the globe is lame.
The web pages screen can be used in a basic mode, which only requires you to drop in a folder to take the pictures from and another folder where you want all the pages to be made. It composes basic web pages and leaves you to put them where others can see them with your favorite ftp client.
There are 2 extensions to this area - resizing and customized html. Resizing is pretty obvious - you tell it the largest size the pictures are allowed to be, and it copies them proportionally down to fit in that space and puts the small copy in your output folder. If you don't like my presets, you can type in custom values. The custom html tools take some explaining. I'll write more of this later, but the short version is that if you know your way around HTML, you can insert files that will be used before the list of images, and after as well. There are lots of little goodies in here, feel free to experiment.
The Slide Show module is small but does what I want it to do. Similar to all the other sections, you drag in the folder of pictures that you want to show. Then, you tell it if you want to show them full screen and whether you want to start a timer to advance the pictures. You can also change these after the show has started. Then press Go. There are a lot of hidden features in here. Try rolling over the corners of the screen, you'll see some icons appear. These let you go forward (upper right), back (upper left), set your background image (lower right), or stop the show (lower left). There are also key equivalents to all of these - the 4 arrow keys are: left = back, right = forward, up = stop, down = background. There is also a Caption editor in Slide Show. Press C to bring up the caption editor and browser. Read or edit the caption as you so desire, then press Return to go to the next picture. Currently, captions are limited to 255 characters. To close the caption window, click in the main image or press Escape. Note that if you use Focus Follows Mouse, you have to leave the mouse over the caption window as soon as it comes up or it will just evaporate.
The Movie module is probably my favorite. My camera has a time interval mode that lets me take pictures every 10 seconds or whatever until the battery dies or I fill my card. I drag in the folder of the images, and set up how fast I want the movie to play, and press go. The default settings are safe for viewing on BeOS, MacOS, and Windows, so I can send these movies to other people with little concern of if they can play it or not. If you know what you are doing, you can play with the File Type and Codec settings to fine tune your movie, but some BeOS codecs aren't available on other platforms any more, and vice versa as I'm sure you're aware. Using Movie mode, you get fun things like slide shows and time lapses. I am basically out of web space, but I can email you a sample file until I can afford a static IP again.