managing digital photos

[bew79]

i'd like to know how people out there manage the massive number of digital photos downloaded onto the network from digital cameras. it seems that every event there is a staff member takes 100's of pictures (of which about 10 are useful) and then downloads them straight to the servers. And these days the image files are nearly 10MB each so it takes massive storage space.

 

i know quotas would prevent this however i'm not sure it facilitates it, by which i mean you want the photos taken and stored (good ones) just in a more controlled way. one method i was thinking is a web based photo management whereby images are uploaded and keywords etc added to create a managed catalogue. has anyone use such a system? i'd also be interested in how others are managing this.

 

Thanks.

[Andrew_C]

Every so often, I hit big folders with J-PEG Imager and squash them all to a sensible size for on-screen/projecting. You only need 1M+ if you are planning on printing large. Those who might be planning this get warning!

[cookie_monster]

Here I run tools to see where massive folders are then take a look, if it's a dump of 100's of pics I tell them to reduce it to a few that they want to keep. If after a few days they haven't I copy them to a CD then compress the pics to 1024x768 and leave them, that way they know what's on the CD and they can still browse the folder but they're big enough to put in word docs or powerpoints.

 

The problem is with digital cameras people will go out and take 200 pics of an event and take the few they want but keep the rubbish 'just in case'. I can't justify the cost.

[ICT_GUY]

Use Tree Size Pro to find out who are the biggest offenders and squish the image sizes. I also have a digi pics folder that they download all of their images to, this is organised into the years that the images were taken (so they can be archived once out of date).

[seanmh]

I have a seperate server and use this Open Source Web Gallery For Photos, Video, Audio, and Documents. Then have a share on the sever that Galleryserver is pointing at and staff can copy photos into folders that they can also create. Then when the database is sychronised the photos appear in the gallery. Means I don't have hundreds of photos hidden all over the main server that nobody looks at. Periodically look in staff home folders and If I find any photos I move then onto Gallery server - staff are pretty good and put them in Gallery server share as a rule as initially I did threaten to delete any potos found in home folders after I had set this facility up.

 

Works well for me anyway.

[sparkeh]

I added a NAS box to host a media library, all images and DVDs go on there and staff are left to organise it themselves. Everyone so often pictures are resized to free up space.

[cookie_monster]

I added a NAS box to host a media library, all images and DVDs go on there and staff are left to organise it themselves. Everyone so often pictures are resized to free up space.

 

 

Do you back this up? I thought about having a box with a load of drives in but worried about it loosing everything, I suppose I could run a weekly backup to an external drive.

[sparkeh]

Do you back this up? I thought about having a box with a load of drives in but worried about it loosing everything, I suppose I could run a weekly backup to an external drive.

 

Yeah we got two Terastations, one hosts the media library and the other is a backup drive for the server and the media library.

[enjay]

We've shown people how to reduce the file size using the XP PowerToy, and have a Buffalo LinkStation Pro on the network which they keep them all on. When they fill that, I will archive the oldest ones off (people typically only want the last 18 months or so anyway).

[dhicks]

i'd like to know how people out there manage the massive number of digital photos downloaded onto the network from digital cameras.

 

I'm just sorting this out today. I have a seperate file server virtual machine running Debian (because I couldn't get Ubuntu to run paravirtualised under Xen - I now have Debian 5.03 running kernel 2.6.26-2-xen-686, I think) and Likewise Open CIFS (now figuring out how to configure that) to provide file shares to Windows machines.

 

That VM, with a terabyte or so of storage space, will provide a file share where people can dump photos. I'll then have a Python script look at the file area periodically and index the images to go into a web-based search engine. I have most of the web-based bit working, I just need to change around how the backend works a bit to fit in better with how people actually want to use it.

 

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David Hicks

[p858snake]

I'm just sorting this out today. I have a seperate file server virtual machine running Debian (because I couldn't get Ubuntu to run paravirtualised under Xen - I now have Debian 5.03 running kernel 2.6.26-2-xen-686, I think) and Likewise Open CIFS (now figuring out how to configure that) to provide file shares to Windows machines.

 

That VM, with a terabyte or so of storage space, will provide a file share where people can dump photos. I'll then have a Python script look at the file area periodically and index the images to go into a web-based search engine. I have most of the web-based bit working, I just need to change around how the backend works a bit to fit in better with how people actually want to use it.

 

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David Hicks

You might to look at something like ZenPhoto (i havn't used it in awhile) but it works by putting the photos in the folder like how you want, then if people want to caption them or such they can do it from the web frontend.

[dhicks]

You might to look at something like ZenPhoto

 

I think my application is better :-) The idea is that staff (or pupils) can come along and dump images on a standard Windows file share, mounted as a drive, and the indexing application takes care of the rest. It treats folder and file names as tags, so to "tag" an image staff know you simply have to appropriately name a folder of images copied straight from a camera and copy them on to the "photos" drive. I'm just sorting out support for file permissions - that's what the thread about configuring Samba is about, Likewise Open turned out to work in a different way than I wanted.The web front end supports searching, produces thumbnails, provides an RSS feed for named tags, and even supports CoolIris for that daft-but-fun 3D lots-of-photos-whizzing-past effect.

 

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David Hicks

[enjay]

then if people want to caption them or such they can do it from the web frontend.

 

Not sure I'd want the pupils adding captions to all these photos - not without some form of editorial control anyway!

[cookie_monster]

I think my application is better :-) The idea is that staff (or pupils) can come along and dump images on a standard Windows file share, mounted as a drive, and the indexing application takes care of the rest. It treats folder and file names as tags, so to "tag" an image staff know you simply have to appropriately name a folder of images copied straight from a camera and copy them on to the "photos" drive. I'm just sorting out support for file permissions - that's what the thread about configuring Samba is about, Likewise Open turned out to work in a different way than I wanted.The web front end supports searching, produces thumbnails, provides an RSS feed for named tags, and even supports CoolIris for that daft-but-fun 3D lots-of-photos-whizzing-past effect.

 

--

David Hicks

 

 

 

Is this likely to become an EduProject or find it's way onto the wiki?

[pwds]

Second recommendation for Zenphoto if you want a way of organising and presenting photographs- really easy to customise (can have the school logo and match the style of the intranet for example) and add modules for slide shows or a whole host of functions.

 

Can also have group based permissions so only staff can see some albums- although AFAIK ZenPhoto doesn't work with LDAP authentication so it would be yet another username and password.

 

Open Source though so nothing stopping someone writing a add on.

[contink]

I've been looking at this again today and because it's a primary school it'd be pretty pointless trying to install a *Nix server just to handle photos, besides staff rarely listen and I've bigger battles to fight.

 

Instead I'm looking at Image Converter Plus: image command line converter - professional image SDK, image console, image tools and putting together a script to go on a regular hunt through home directories to find any photo images that are either over a certain size or new since the last run. It'll then backup the original files to the archive drive, I've put aside for this, before processing the photos to turn them into 1280x1024 JPEG images of 75% quality and replacing the originals.

 

I'm envisaging a drop of around 60% disk usage on the first run alone....

 

When things are a bit more sorted I'll see about writing another script that identifies files that are older than a set target date and having them converted to 640x480 60% quality and adds a shortcut to the archive...

 

I'll share the script when it's finished anyway...

 

 

And yeah it's £80+ but for the reduced hassle factor of constant "disk full" messages or staff promising to handle the process themselves but not bothering...

[buzzard]

A simple thing we do is to set the digital cameras to a 640x480 res, it's easily good enough for what they want to use the images for

[runcmd]

At the primary schools I work for, to manage the vast amounts of photos, videos and other large files that modern schools create I'm getting new servers with larger hard disks and larger backup systems.

 

The reason I dont compress is both schools print poster sizied images from alot of their pix and a1mb image is unusable for image that size.

[contink]

As promised I've put something together which is currently running on my primary file server and so far I've managed to wipe more than 60% OFF the file sizes for the originals...

 

All the stuff is backed up but I'm not anticipating anyone needing to access the backups..

 

Anyway, script is up here:

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/scripts/59761-image-convertor-plus-image-backup-reduce-batch-file.html

... along with information on how to get the educational discount for the necessary Image Convertor software.

 

 

@runcmd: Whilst that's ok if you can do it... All my primaries are now budget negative and spending money on bigger hard drives when a little time spent housekeeping the images to save the "good" ones for poster quality and delete the rest would surely be a better use of money.... Course it's time too.. But I wouldn't spend unnecessarily on even bigger backup media for just images... Just my opinion mind.