QUESTION · MEDIA PRODUCTION Q&A

CJ had a program that he described for sorting and editing photo folders. What was it?

ASKED BY · Thomas Johnson · ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA · 25 SEP 2026 · ▶ 00:51:43

THE PANEL'S ANSWER

CJ used Claude (Fable 5.1) to sort 1,000 unordered photo scans by analyzing visual content, film grain, clothing, hairstyles, and document metadata (like marriage certificates) to group them chronologically across 60–70 years. He then had Claude generate an AppleScript for Keynote to create a Ken Burns-style slideshow with magic move transitions and object push effects.

Summarised by AI from what the panel said. Watch the moment for the full answer.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

From the transcript.

Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.

51:35passed away last month and I was in charge of the, among other things, the memorial slideshow that was going to be at the visitation. And I had a thousand scans. I had a thousand prints and negatives combined that I had to scan to get up on the screen. But they weren't in any particular order. And what I had done is I took all 1,000 scans, just put them in a folder, and then I think

52:02I sicked Claude Cowork on it. And I was with Fable, Fable 5-1. And I just said, hey, this is what I've got there's pictures from you know 60 or 70 years of time some of them are digital and have metadata some of them do not sometimes I had film negative sometimes I had prints help me group them chronologically group them because when you get like a literal like a basket of photos that have been picked

52:29through a hundred times there are no particular order so like the stuff that was from you know the kids birthday party is right next to you know the picture of the grandparent as a child and it's like okay these were taken 40 years apart they this the the fact that they were scanned sequentially had nothing to do with it claude did a really nice job of analyzing the it got to know the people that were in the photos

52:53once i started to tag them and then it would use logic uh if i had a picture of a document like a picture of a marriage certificate and it actually like was able it started to date the the other photos that were taken around it uh based on the date that was on the marriage certificate and then Then it would look at hairstyle and clothing and film grain and start to group the people.

53:13It did a remarkably good job of putting everything together. And then I said, I want like a Ken Bernsie style slideshow where all the pictures grow and shrink. But I want it to be very high quality and I don't want to have to do a lot of work to do it. Right. OK, get in line. But what it did is it built an Apple script, put it into Keynote,

53:34put all the pictures kind of chronologically based on the era made that put them small on one page big on the next page and then used a magic move transition in between with a six second duration on the transition and it was like magic and then I and there's like oh that's a great idea now what I'd like you to do is do object push in between the different sets of photos so the

53:54photos fly in and out and like and it I think I went through this is the the embarrassing part. I went through 17 iterations before I got to the thing that I really wanted because I kept having more ideas, but I needed to do it across, you know, 200 slides and I didn't want to do it manually. And I totally blew through my Claude subscription for the two weeks that I

54:19did that. But it was kind of like magic to do it. And if, if, when you have a weird problem that It seems like I don't know how I would do this with the time and resources that I have. Just asking the question like, well, what if I could is I think it's pretty darn useful. If you're finding Office Hours valuable, I encourage you to give some of that value back.

54:44We are a nonprofit. We're largely member supported. We appreciate all the volunteer hours and time that is put in here, but we also appreciate donations. So if you want to chip in and help us keep the lights on and keep the show coming to you, Office Hours at global slash donate. We appreciate every little bit. it. Next question. Next up is coming in from Andy Kokendorf from VR Florida. I have a Sennheiser

55:05416 that I want to rig on my standing desk for Zoom. Which shock mount do you recommend mounting hardware? Thanks. Bill? It's not a super critical thing because the 416 by itself does not have a particularly large problem with handling noise. It is internally created such that people People use these in the field a ton. So it's not like you're hanging a large diaphragm condenser that literally will pick up every single shake.

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