Rampant Digital Pictures

[MrsGrinch]

Hi. I wasn't sure where to put this question. Does anybody's school have an effective policy for managing the use of digital cameras and the storage of the pictures? I work at two schools and the pictures are driving me nuts. The teachers take pictures of everything, unload the cameras everywhere and then leave them. Then the kids use the photos in class work, which creates huge documents and then they get left, clogging up disks.

 

I'm not sure how to prevent clangers like this, either: One teacher bought a brand new camera, and the default setting for the picture resolution was on High. She took a camera full of pictures, stuffed them all into a document on her wirelss laptop, and sent it off to print on the colour laser. Nothing seemed to happen and she left it. The pictures kept appearing in chunks, on and off for weeks, until almost a ream of paper had been printed. She only finally complained because her laptop was acting odd.

 

There are no automatic archiving facilities at either school, but we can put it on if someone know of a good system. Back when I worked for The Big Corporation, all our junk vanished off to archive ever month.

 

Cheers.

 

Michele

[ICT_GUY]

I have a central folder called digi pics, which is organised into year groups / classes.

 

Pics are loaded onto the system by me.

 

I regularly to a jpeg search and use the ms picture resizer to resize all pics to a max of 1200 x 1024. This cuts them down to less than 100kb each.

 

And I feel your pain, my server is down to the last 5 gigs of spare space.

[TechMonkey]

We use irfanview to resize pictures as they are put on. Generally though we transfer the pictures so we do it as not many are taken here. There is an Art/Photography area for the lessons and we check that from time to time but we have instructed teh Art teachers how to use Irfanview and so they do it.

[dhicks]

Does anybody's school have an effective policy for managing the use of digital cameras and the storage of the pictures?

 

Not sure about an "effective" policy - we have a couple of Canon EOS400Ds which we use to photograph various school events. I'm a crummy photographer, so I simply set the camera on multi-shot and take picture after picture until one turns out okay! We probably shot around 10GB of photos last night at our art show / curriculum evening. I have a 200GB VM set aside just for photos, which can grow another 200GB or so, but about the only thing I can really do to limit storage size is go through the images and weed out all but the ones we want to keep.

 

I never did find a decent network-capable image management program - something like Picassa but that would work with multiple users.

 

--

David Hicks

[RabbieBurns]

we have a central folder on the server for pics as well, and all staff know to use the xp image resizer powertoy before uploading them.

[katem]

we have a central folder on the server for pics as well, and all staff know to use the xp image resizer powertoy before uploading them.

 

Re: XP Resizer PowerToy - Brilliant little utility - just installed this and cut photo folder down by over half! my backups might not fail so often now!

[ICT_GUY]

I just did a search through the staff user areas for pics.

 

I found 3 gigs worth, now all rapidly being rezized down from an average 4megs to 120kb. Good job too since we were down to our last 3 gigs of storage again.

 

New server coming soon, 3 TB!

[antoeknee]

My really big issue is the staff who think its OK to store their personal stuff on the server, music, pictures, etc

 

Came across a folder in on staff area today 'Dads Funeral'!!!

[elsiegee40]

Windows server 2k3 R2 and strict control of file storage ... they can complain, but it doesn't get them anywhere. It's resize or fail to save anything

[MrsGrinch]

Thanks, everyone, for the commiserations. I'm just going to have to harden my heart when someone (she knows who she is) shows up with a full quota, an overloaded laptop and two 2-gig sticks full of pictures. Or the guy who has the complete Bob Dylan works downloaded from iTunes......

(Is that really on the curriculum for KS2 or is he pulling my leg?)

 

 

Michele