Can I solve the "Polaroid Problem" ?

Question

Can I solve the "Polaroid Problem" ?

I'm looking for a solution to the "Polaroid Problem" and wondered if anyone had any thoughts on this.

I'm a casting director and Polaroids are disappearing. I need a way to take pictures of talent, print them directly onto blank size cards which the talent then fill out. I'd like to use my elderly G3 iMac running 8.6 (Or I'll upgrade to 9). I've got three consumer digital cameras and a couple of ink jet color printers which will work (slowly) for the size cards which are templated in AppleWorks.

Obviously it's best if the camera can download pictures directly to the hard disk rather than firing up the picture software for every shot, down loading the shot and then dragging it to the template. I suppose what I'm actually looking for here is a software "Kludge" that will allow me to do that.

Thanks for any help you can give or thoughts you might have.

MacBook '07, Mac OS X (10.5.1), Powerbook G4, iBook G4, 2 Bondi Blue iMacs

Posted on Feb 15, 2008 9:46 AM

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Answer 1

Feb 16, 2008 6:59 PM in response to Phillycasting

Hi

I did something similar (but not the same) on a project to produce school ID cards.

I was running 9.1 on an early imac and the job was pretty straightforward. I did however have to use photoshop to run an action to reduce all the pictures to the same size and shape. (A classfull of kids is too many to do by hand). I had a fuji camera connected directly to the mac and as soon as the card was full I pull all the images into a folder named after the relevant class - then I used Photoshop to do the donkey before pulling the pictures into a CW database to generate the cards.

Thinking about it your problem is straightforward and easy to solve.

Use your camera in the portrait position (not landscape) so that the pictures are the right shape to start with, set the camera so that the images are at the lowest size possible and then take the pictures. The images are stored on the camera as JPEGS and JPEGS can be placed into a CW document. So - just drag the image from the camera straight onto your template, Chances are it will still be too big so just scale it to fit your card by shift-dragging a corner and that should be that.

Let me know if it works.

PS in case I've misunderstood the whole thing - you can drag all the pictures off the camera and they are automatically stored on the hard disk - there's rarely any need to use any camera software at all.

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