Step up my website and photo management workflow

May 30, 2018 2:14 PM

I design and update the website for a major yearly community event. My workflow and tech resources need an upgrade. While most of the year I work from my home iMac desktop, I've been using a Windows 7 laptop during the event weekend itself. But that laptop is dying and needs replacing. Can you help me figure out if an iPad Pro will suit my needs? (specific issues inside...)

(note: I don't do websites as my day job, this is a side project, so I'm not quite up on the current best practices, which is what I'm trying to improve on here.)

I have been hand coding the site in Sublime Text, using PHP and some minor MySQL, with locally housed files and MAMP or XAMPP to run for testing locally. But that means the files are taking up space on my hard drives, and I have to manually sync when I move from one device to the other.

So I'd like to switch to having a remote server be the home for the working/dev files. I have a subdomain already existing on the site, that I used to use for testing before I learned how to use MAMP. Is setting that subdomain up with WebDAV the best way to go here?

The other main pain point is photo management. During the event, for about 4 days, I receive hundreds of photos per day that need to get processed into an online photo gallery. The photogs send me full size jpgs, and I need to

1. resize down to a web/mobile appropriate size
2. rename sequentially
3. watermark with a logo
4. also create thumbnails for each.

Currently I do all that in a combo of Photoshop and Bridge on the laptop - but again, the laptop is dying and hard to use, and the software versions are outdated.

I would LIKE to be able to replace the laptop with an iPad Pro, both for reasons of affordability and that I have other uses for one, whereas I have less need of a full laptop like a Macbook. It looks like the Coda app should work well for the web coding part, but what about processing all those pictures?

So I guess, in sum: What's the best way to switch from locally housed website files to remotely housed ones; and what tools are there for batch resizing and reaming hundreds of photos on an iPad Pro?

posted by dnash to Technology (2 answers total)

You're going to create a nightmare trying to use an iPad to resize batch photos, add a watermark, etc. A cheap windows laptop will be much easier to use than the iPad.
posted by gregr at 2:46 PM on May 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

If you a subscriber to Adobe's creative cloud suite of software, they have mobile-friendly versions of their programs. I've not used these, but wanted to let you know about it in case you were unaware.

If you're not currently a subscriber, you can probably get a 30-day free trial. Or if you need it for longer, you can purchase by the month.
posted by hydra77 at 4:25 PM on May 30, 2018