I have finally decided to start adding pictures of the patients to the charts after all these years. While I had played with this in the past, I had not done it on a regular basis.

I picked up a couple inexpensive web cams and started to play with them again.

The issue, of course is that the 640 x 480 photos need to be resized to 100 x 100. I looked around for simple ways my staff could do this. I reviewed old listings on the ACUB with some suggestions but all of them are somewhat involved.

I then ran accross a program called picsizer. It appears to be exactly what I was trying to find. It will change the size effortlessly, but will not crop. This is both good and bad. We are going from a 1.3 (640x480) to a 1.0 (100x100) ratio. I figure that if the picture has enough "fluff" on the sides it will not need to be cropped.

I will begin implementing this this week. I will update on the progress.

The program link is below, did I mention that it is FREE!!! Tried it on an XP machine, not sure about Win7. I have no financial interests in this program (and besides, it is FREE.)

http://www.axiomx.com/picsizer.htm

Your picture may be distorted, but I'm interested to see how it turns out. My receptionist just opens it in Picasa and crops it. Think how nice it would be if AC did this automatically like FB does!

The program I find that's very easy for staff to work with is the Image Resizer Powertoy (by Microsoft Surprisingly). A simple right click to resize images. MS didn't release the same tool for Windows 7 yet, but someone has made a copy of the original.

Download Here (XP): http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=211477

Download Here (Win 7): http://imageresizer.codeplex.com/releases/view/82827

I wrote a little utility that crops and resizes JPEGs with 1 click, designed to be used with AC.
Resultant files are 200 x 200 higher compression (lossy) size about 60K
Using a WiFi SD card, my MA clicks takes the photo. It uploads to the server. She runs the PhotoReSizer clicks on the nose, the image is created and stored in the Import folder. Then she opens the patient chart and imports the photo.
No additional cropping or resizing needed.
I plan on adding a way to tag the file with the patient name (right now just uses the name of the file from the camera), maybe even from a XLS file exported from AC.

It is my plan to post a link to the install package on the board, for those who wish to use it.

I promised this not too long ago, but got busy and I don't have the realtively short users quide done yet (there are a couple of non-intuitive things that need to be spelled out).

So with your indulgence, please stay tuned if you are interested.
Fee: feed back.

We are still waiting! Surely there will be a Shareware fee!

Why does this program want to make major adjustments to my .NET framework profile?!