Last week we received the worst possible task - we got nursery homework for our 2-year-old. Could we, please, prepare some photos from holidays and send them over1.
Now, this could have been worse. They just wanted a number of photos that we could email over with some explanation. In the past this has included printing and sticking too - something that took far longer than we had anticipated.
We started this by grabbing a few photos from Google Photos and downloading them. I then, foolishly, open up my laptop’s office software2.
Regular readers will be shocked at this - knowing how I use Emacs across almost all workflows. Why did I not reach for Emacs? Well I thought it would be slower to get the images on the page in the way I wanted them - that was, of course, foolish!
After several minutes of trying to resize and arrange the photos on the page, including an interesting bug where rotating a photo I selected rotated a completely different photo, I gave up and launched Emacs.
I have org-download ready to go and so, it became as simple as dragging the photos from the folder into my new .org file.
That created something like the below - I put some simple headings in and a few simple header arguments and, boom, using C-c C-e l p we had a new .pdf files created ready to go!
#+OPTIONS: num:nil
#+ATTR_ORG: :width 100
#+LATEX_HEADER: \pagestyle{empty}
* Holidays!
** To the beach in Spain, with the Family
#+DOWNLOADED: file:///home/user/Downloads/1.jpg @ 2025-07-03 20:53:55
#+ATTR_ORG: :width 100
[[file:1.jpg]]
[...]
My conclusion? I have used LaTeX to write a 200+ page PhD thesis, and published papers using just Org-mode. However, when you stop using tools it is easy to forget how difficult some work flows are and, in a heady nostalgic haze, you might revert to a “simpler” solution.
There is almost always a quicker way of doing almost any task using plain text and some knowledge of the underlying system, use that knowledge, free yourself and use that extra time for something meaningful - which in my case was getting to bed 30 minutes early!