F5 Networks' Purim party pictures

Occasionally, I take pictures of my peers at the Tel-Aviv office of F5 Networks.

The latest pictures are from the Purim party.

syndication feed of my pictures

I am posting, once a week in average, pictures that I take with my camera to a picture gallery where I keep these pictures. I've been doing this since my first child, Aviv, was born more than 7 years ago.

The process goes like this:

• I create a new directory that has a name of the day that I process the images, e.g., 25.3.2008
• I insert the memory card from the camera onto a card reader that is connected to a USB port on my computer
• I mount the device
• I copy all *.jpg files into the newly created directory
• I review and delete by hand pictures that I don't want to be on the site
• I then execute a script that goes over the new pictures, creates thumbnails for them, scales images to 900x600, (they don't need to be big for web consumption), and generates HTML code that allows their display. The script also updates the main page of the site with the newest set of pictures and updates the archives (by year and month).
• then I execute GIMP and go over the new set of image and I manually rotate, adjust colors and unsharp mask those that need it.
• finally, I merge changes to my home page using Unison.

I want to introduce some additional automation to the process:

1. auto rotate the scaled images according to the exif orientation information.
2. be able to automatically add 30% saturation to color
3. unsharp mask all images with static values for the unsharp mask parameters (I use 0.1, 1 and 0).
   

This should eliminate the need for the manual work in GIMP.

I just don't seem to find the time to see how to automatically do this.

Finally, I'd also like to add RSS or ATOM feed of the newly added picture set so my family and friends that monitor this site can get the updates with their feed reader rather than periodically probing the site for new content.

I'd appreciate suggestions on how to do these automation steps easily using Perl.