I am so new to coppermine, only exposure one of my favorite sites uses it, but I'm working on a new website for my son's National Guard unit who are deploying to Iraq in November. I have a friend who is helping me with a php site and we're planning on using coppermine for our photo gallery. So I have a CD here full of training photo's, I would like to reduce size, crop out wasteful backgrounds and such, normally I'd fire up photoshop and go to town. But in doing some searches here in the forums, I see where coppermine has a photo editor.
Is there any advantage to using one over the other? I am also torn between letting users upload their own pictures but I've become spoiled on optimzing pictures period... in file size, in the cropping that lets you have more of your subject instead of wasting valuable file size on something like a square inch or more of extra, non-essential background, of sky, etc., and many of the users will not understand about dpi issues and will most likely do nothing but take the pictures straight from their digital to the upload. And I don't want an instant resize option, as that simply reduces the pic, while I want to optimize what's IN the picture on a resize, first and foremost.
So, can I do the same in the photo editor in coppermine, or is it pretty much the same, if I edit in photoshop before uploading? How does the coppermine gallery deal with different picture sizes? While I'd like all pictures to be similiar, an auto-size option isn't always very kind to picture quality.
So, experienced users...would love your thoughts before I go resizing 100 pictures in photoshop... :-) Muchas gracias for any tips!