Gathering wedding photos (was: FTP...)

[Paul Sladen]

On Wed, 10 Jun 2009, Franz Waldmüller wrote:
> The task is to collect the pictures, [...] from a wedding

The most realiable way I've seen to successfully collect large numbers of
digital wedding photographs, is to have a laptop sat in the corner during
the evening party.  Have someone techncially literate be in charge of the
laptop (the types of people who enjoy looking after laptop, tend not to be
into socialising/ dancing, so the combination tends to work quite well).

Using announcements, hinting, pre-warning and general cajoling of the
guests, gradually lure them over one-by-one to the laptop corner.  Politely
prise the camera from their hands, remove the memory card (or plug the
camera in---see note at the bottom) and copy all of the images up to that
point onto the laptop.  Save them in a sensibly-named directory.

For bonus points, you can combine this copying operation with a projector;
running the raw unprocessed images as a continous slideshow. This helps, as
people stand and watch the images from earlier in the day, understand what
is happening and are more encouraged to assist.

For anyone where this didn't work, ask them to burn a CD and stick it in the
snailmail post.  Say a person had to leave early but particularly wants to
contribute their photos, but doesn't want to burn them, *then* go to the
hassle of setting up the FTP account specifically for them.  If you send a
ftp://user:pass@weddingpics.example.com/incoming/  link to them in an email,
this should open in most browsers, and is likely to avoid any transcription
problems.

Most will be USB mass-storage, but some (eg. iPhones) will need gphoto2.

Hope that helps!

	-Paul

PS. Try to have a couple of card readers (some cards occasionally just don't
like some readers).  Somebody will probably have something rare like Memory
Stick, so make sure you can read those, and finally have as many USB
mini-micro-this-that cables as you can find in your junk box.  Cameras have
also sorts of weird USB sockets.
-- 
Why do one side of a triangle when you can do all three.  Somewhere, GB.