MultiSurf

I don't normally post much on WakeWorld, cuz its tougher to post decent size images. So I do most of my posting on the tigeowners forum. But being a programmer, I wrote a little program that optimizes images for WW restrictions, and makes it just as easy to post. So anyway....

We were out on Lake Oroville all weekend. It is VERY low, and very hard to get on, which is great for us because there is almost NO ONE on the lake, and its still HUGE. We were surfing all the time, and started breaking out the long board for some extra fun.

Here is my son RJ with his cousin Joe in the front.



Once they figured out how to freeride, they started messing around and I started telling them different things to try.





This one cracks me up.



The above was actually our second attempt at MultiSurfing, the first one was even crazier. Here they are trying to get up.





In between attempts, that is Thomas 6 (T-Bone) on left, Maddie 10 (Max) in the middle, and RJ 13 on right.



Here they are getting up.





And they even were able to freeride. Don't let the stills fool you, there were able to freeride almost indefinitely, for several minutes on 2 attempts.









Thats actually an epoxy mini longboard, 8'0 from Isle.

Looks like a lot of fun. Very cool

Nice pictures, the water looks awesome. The kids smiles say it all!

Great pics. And great size! I would be interested in your program for the pics, I don't post pics on here for the same reason!

Its not ready for prime time, I run it from the command line. But its just a script that uses ImageMagick. This script will size the images down to fit within 1000x1000, and with a quality of 80, which is very good quality. It keeps the image size under 150k, which is what WW requires. The main thing that makes images LARGER is they contain META DATA in them. They contain color profiles, which only safari supports anyway, so you don't need them in the images, and they also have other tags and stuff embedded in the image. So when you use photoshop to resize an image, it may make the IMAGE part of the binary smaller, but it leaves all the meta data and color profile information in the image, uncompressed, and it takes a lot of space, sometimes more than others. The method I use in my script, uses a IM method called THUMBNAIL which will strip all color profile and meta data from the image, and then size, so its as small as possible.

http://www.eventpix.com/ is a site I built and so have worked with these techniques and optimizations for years. Here is the script, in case it makes sense to you. I could make a nice GUI application out of it, but don't have the time, maybe someone else could.

This is a unix shell script, would run on linux or mac os x with imagemagick installed. Would need to be converted to windows BAT file to run on windows, but it would use same IM convert syntax.


#!/bin/sh

cnt=1
for filename in "$@"
do
echo "${cnt}: Converting $filename to ${filename%.*}_ww.jpg"
convert -size 1000x1000 "${filename}" -thumbnail 1000x1000 -quality 80 "${filename%.*}_ww.jpg"
if [ $? -ne 0 ]
then
echo "error"
exit 1
fi
cnt=$(( $cnt + 1 ))
done
exit 0
}

Robert - you are a genius!

ah, shucks.

Holy Cow! Wow! I'll need my brother (he's the computer genius in the family) to decifer your script, but that is awesome....

ImageMagick is free to download and use (open source) for any platform. It will install a command line program named convert or convert.exe on windows, among other things. The key to my script is just one line. The other lines are to automate doing this on several images at once. The one line is:

convert -size 1000x1000 "${filename}" -thumbnail 1000x1000 -quality 80 "${filename%.*}_ww.jpg"

you can simplify and do yourself like

convert "inputimage.jpg" -thumbnail 1000x1000 -quality 80 "outputimage.jpg"

Just replace the input and output images with real names. I think those images I posted were normally 200-300 images at that size, but with this command, stripping everything unneeded, down to about 100k.

Great job Robert! I just wanted to see if my MS DOS conversion worked. My batch file (which over-writes the existing file)

for %%i in (*.jpg) do convert -size 1000x1000 %%i -thumbnail 1000x1000 -quality 70 %%i

I had to adjust the quality to keep the files under 150K

Did it work?

As long as you keep the quality over 70, the pictures will look great, 80 is optimal, but 70 is just fine. If you go down to 60, you will start to see more artifacts.

Pictures look good. Bigger the better, that is why I haven't posted much on WW, hard to do decent pictures until I took the time to fix that.