Media\Image Management - Staff filling servers with photos

[robyholmes]

I work in many primary school and have come across a common problem. Child tracking using photo's, staff seem to take loads of pictures of the children for there assessments and tracking etc, all of which are imported to the server in there own My Pictures folders. Many of the schools are becoming full with multiple high resolution images. I would like to know if anyone has a way of managing this software wise? Due to the support structure to the schools I am only on site for a limited amount of time which means setting cameras to lower res etc isn't possible. Idealy i'm looking for the following:

 

Camera Import

Auto Resize

Central Share Storage (IE Import to one share and not My Pictures)

User Permissions (Head access all classes etc)

Size Limits

Local Software (Not really after web based)

 

Anyone got any ideas? I have tried things like Picasa but it has to be setup per staff account and often loses settings and shares.

[featured_spectre]

tell them that is what external hard drives are for....

[InterwebsGuy]

tell them that is what external hard drives are for....

Never the ideal solution. Then I don't have that ideal solution either.

[featured_spectre]

Staff here use external HDDs now as I refuse to let them clog up our SAN with useless files (who needs 8000 MP3s...really).

[plexer]

You could regularly run a tool such as Batch Picture Resize to resize any pictures found.

 

Ben

[dhicks]

I work in many primary school and have come across a common problem.

 

Exactly - there's a huge potential market there for a good solution. My thinking so far is a dedicated central storage server, integrated with Active Directory, that automatically indexes, sizes and possibly face-recognises photos (and maybe video). I was interested to hear about EyeFi's cards the other week:

 

Eye-Fi memory cards: wireless photo and video uploads straight from your camera to your computer & the web.

 

They would seem to provide a perfect solution for at least getting the pictures from the camera to a central server easily - the teacher simply takes a picture which gets transferred straight to the server, nothing to plug in or fiddle around with.

[robyholmes]

Exactly - there's a huge potential market there for a good solution. My thinking so far is a dedicated central storage server, integrated with Active Directory, that automatically indexes, sizes and possibly face-recognises photos (and maybe video). I was interested to hear about EyeFi's cards the other week:

 

Eye-Fi memory cards: wireless photo and video uploads straight from your camera to your computer & the web.

 

They would seem to provide a perfect solution for at least getting the pictures from the camera to a central server easily - the teacher simply takes a picture which gets transferred straight to the server, nothing to plug in or fiddle around with.

 

WOW that is cool, never seem them before. Like you say that would get your pictures on to the server and looking at the software it does seem to support multiple cards and destinations for each card. Very interesting and I might even infest in one myself to have a play with. Thanks for the link.

[maniac]

Exactly - there's a huge potential market there for a good solution. My thinking so far is a dedicated central storage server, integrated with Active Directory, that automatically indexes, sizes and possibly face-recognises photos (and maybe video). I was interested to hear about EyeFi's cards the other week:

 

Eye-Fi memory cards: wireless photo and video uploads straight from your camera to your computer & the web.

 

They would seem to provide a perfect solution for at least getting the pictures from the camera to a central server easily - the teacher simply takes a picture which gets transferred straight to the server, nothing to plug in or fiddle around with.

 

Webserver installed with http://gallery.menalto.com/ setup with LDAP authentication is the closest I've found. I've not set it up myself, but there's potential there to do what you want. It wouldn't be that hard to teach staff to use it as it's fairly straightforward and you can set limits on picture sizes in the admin console and it will automatically resize them.

 

Mike

[simpsonj]

You could create a central store for all photos, and then run something like Riot (RIOT - Radical Image Optimization Tool) which will at least keep file sizes down.

[dhicks]

It wouldn't be that hard to teach staff to use it as it's fairly straightforward and you can set limits on picture sizes in the admin console and it will automatically resize them.

 

The automatic image resizing part is dead easy, just a couple of lines of Python code. Integrate your image file server with Active Directory (either via Samba or simply by running on a Windows server) and people can simply browse a file share to look at photos. The tricky part is getting people to spend any time whatsoever learning how to use any system - we are talking about nursery school teachers here with 15 or so small children to give attention to, an ideal system for them is going to be point-the-camera, press-the-take-picture-button, rest-just-happens. Storing and processing large amounts of picture data is a solved problem, and getting the images to the server in the first place looks pretty simple, too, thanks to those Eye-Fi cards. The issue arises when you come to get those pictures back again - how you find the image you want. The class teacher is not going to have time to index photos. You can automatically index by date easily enough, but that's only going to tell you so much - unless you can do something like integrate the schools calander and/or timetable data, so any date/time/location values also gives you any events or class information. Picture taken 22/06/2011, 11:06am... must have been maths class. If there's a decent face recognition library available and your camera tags photos with GPS data you might even be able to say exactly where the photo was taken (although GPS isn't likely to be fine-grained enough to give you anything except "in school" for most things) and who was in it.

[jdoyle]

as well as providing a technical solution to your photo sizing/storage issue, a centralised system may potentially help with Data Protection compliance and metadata tasks (setting copyright data, contact information etc)

 

JISC Digital Media - Systems for Managing Digital Media Collections