G Levy
Image Integration

Gert writes the Gerts Says column here at DIG-mar.com as well as the Dig Update. She has been consulting on the management of digization projects since 1994 and firmly believes in the importance of visual information and increasing access to it through digitzation. She is also an accomplished painter whose work can be seen at GLevyArt.com

Add to a thread or ask a new question

Recent Questions

THREAD: image database migration

QUESTION: Hi Gert,
Do you have any experience/knowledge of the process required in moving an existing Cumulus database from one Win2K Server box to a new box? Our IT dept. isn't very bright with regards to this step and we've lost links to assets as well as some of the assets! Thanks in advance!

RESPONSE: It sounds like you are moving the image files not the database program. When you move any image files, which are being managed by the DAM program, you must move them with the DAM. In other words you should ask you IT people for the new path and then with the Cumulus program move the files. You do not want to let anyone, including IT people transfer files outside of the DAM program or you break the links as you have found out.

Gert - Digital Image Guide
Add to thread

THREAD cumulus export to Access

QUESTION: I'd like to export records from Cumulus 6 to Filemaker PRO. I dont think it can now be done directly but I'm willing to go via MS Access. Cumulus help says thats possible by using the "Export Records to Access.exe"in the "Special" subfolder of the "Menu Commands" Folder.. I've tried this but a dialog continually asks to open the catlog but I have the catalog open and records selected. The Help is a bit confusing as I'm not really sure if its this "simple" or whether the .exe file needs to be copied elsewhere or imported within a preferences setting in Cumulus...there is no Special menu appearing in the Cumulus menu items. Any help most appreciated

RESPONSE: Ian -
You got farther than I thought one could, but Cumulus keeps changing. I have passed on your question to a Cumulus developer, a very good one by the way, if you need one, he used to work for Canto, to see if the current versionIan - You got farther than I thought one could, but Cumulus keeps changing. I have passed on your question to a Cumulus developer, a very good one by the way, if you need one, he used to work for Canto, to see if the current version is making it easier and if so how. Creating something for Access should easily be readable by FMP. The problem usually is capturing the keywords, because of their hierarchical relationship. Anyway, I will pass on whatever I can dig up. is making it easier and if so how. Creating something for Access should easily be readable by FMP. The problem usually is capturing the keywords, because of their hierarchical relationship. Anyway, I will pass on whatever I can dig up.

Hi Trudy, thanks for your prompt reply. I discovered a day after I sent you my query that I inadvertently was selecting the export to access from my old Cumulus5 program folder with a Cumulus 6 catalog (and the function did work with an old Cum 5 catalog I had). The Export to Access doesn't appear to exist for Cumulus 6 (nor any of the other exe files that were in Cum5). So I'm back to a void of knowledge. So please pass that on to your developer friend so as not to confuse him. Read on only if you want a migraine! Thanks again, Ian

My biggest problem is that I'm running a Zeiss microscope camera with software that had an archive plug in to Cumulus5..so it had a filter to generate thumbnails for the special zeiis format (.zvi). However it appeared to be a limited version because when I got to 500 records it wouldn't allow anymore in the catalog. No one at Zeiss or Canto could explain this. I was told to upgrade to Cum6. So I did that only to find the .zvi filter is no longer supported and with no plan to do so. So I can have a catalog with all the text info I want but no thumbnails which are pretty crucial. I'm running a Filemaker Pro5 database of my algae culture collection which has a pretty basic webpresence. I'm thinking of upgrading it to FM Pro 8 Server Advanced and before I encountered all these problems I was naievely hoping it could be hooked up to Cumulus via ODBC to display images...I could probably work around the .zvi problem by duplicating images as jpegs (and in reality for serving on the web I'd have to do that anyway as .zvis are more hungry than tiffs). However as far as I can work out to do this now would require a Cumulus workgroup type product for megadollars (doesn't appear to be much between the single user Cum6 for $200 and a workgroup solution for $20,000?) Now I think I need to look at either php or Lasso to serve up the images so I wanted a way to export the Cumulus records to filemaker/access/excel.

RESPONSE 2 :hi trudy,

here comes the answer to the zeiss question you had forwarded to me ...zeiss/axovision commissioned the filter for their digital microscopes, and we/canto built the filters and the integration between Cumulus 5 and Axovision. zeiss has so far only ordered version 5 products to bundle with their devices.

the technology has been ported to Cumulus 6, but no orders have come in for that. we have no insight into why that is and so can't comment.

as zeiss is the only route to market for this technology it is out of our control. we do will go back to zeiss (and mediadex) though with this request and discuss what could be done. the other issue certainly is to see where a networked (internet-accessable) solution like this would fit, as Canto now focusses on
client/server solutions.

hazy morning greetings
jennifer Neumann
CEO Canto
Add to thread

Questions, Oh do you have questions!!

DAM questions

Cumulus Export and Zeiss Microscope

Portfolio

Export Excel to Cumulus

Publishing your Digital Assets

Difficulty downloading pictures

Protecting your Images

Managing your Digital Assets

Image database migration

DAM Standards

Image database for the web

Digitize medical images to excel

DAM for publishing

Questions to ask when defining needs

Digitize with limited budget.

Return to Thread list

Older Questions

Thread: Portfolio

Question: Hi, I'm starting with Portfolio 7 to organize my photostock (basically images to submit to image banks) and I don't know if it is better to reorganize my files befor to start cataloguin them. I saw that if I have different folders, and if I want to rename the files, two files can appeare in my catalog with the same file name. Is this good or no? Can that bring me any problem in the future. I 'm a little stack in how to start. Any recomendation in how to organize my files or my directores will be welcome. Thanks in advance

RESPONSE: First of all, you should definitely avoid files having the same names which can happen when your folder system gets too detailed. As Portfolio will bring in folder names as keywords ( descriptive terms) I often advise using the folders in that way. For you it might be the topics which you usually shoot or the clients for whom you are shooting. As far as file naming goes, I usually encourage the use of an ID ( your initials) especially for submitting to a photobank, an id which means something for you ( might be an invoice number or client reference or date) and then the 001 etc. This might look like am10122005_001 which would be the first photo you shot on 10/12/05. When you import in to Portfolio from your camera or esisting folders, you can tell it where to place the files and have it rename the files according to whatever three part name you set up. Its very handy. Hope this helps getting you started.

Gert - Digital Image Guide
Add to thread

thread: Standards

QUESTION: I need to know if ther is some standard about digital asset management, specially apply in the publishing way. I know a project of ATRS (Association for retail technology standards). Is there something more?.

Response: Yes, there are standards for metadata, image specifications, preservation, etc developed for almost every type of industry DAM. What are you looking for? The IPTC which stands for International Press Telecommunications Council [http://www.iptc.org/], is probably the usual source of standards and specification for the publishing sector.

Gert - Digital Image Guide
Add to thread

Thread: Questions to ask when defining needs

Question: We are beginning research on DAM systems. We need to define our needs. Do you know of or have you seen anything that lists typical questions that should be asked to define the needs of a company as it pertains to a DAM system.

RESPONSE:I have a such a list on my site that you can find here: Setting up an Image Library.

Your basic questions are who, what, and how.
Who are your users, what are your assets, and how will your users access and use the assets. The DAM you select mustalso meet your access and use requirements, be able to manage your asset file formats and be user friendly as defined by your users.

Good luck and feel free to return with more questions.

Gert - Digital Image Guide
Add to thread

Thread: Image database for the web

Question: I am a Graduate assistant at Ball State University in Indiana working in a historical costume museum. We are in the process of putting the archives into a database. We need to purchase a new image database. What we would like to acheive is having are collection eventually available on our web site. We have a small collection right now of about 3000 artifacts. What are some software you would suggest we look at?

RESPONSE: Tricia -
There are two approaches you can take for putting image databases on the web.

1)You can do it through web technology where you create the web form to search a database that contains a "link" to your image which is then displayed. To do this, you must create the "screen" image and "thumbnail" that you want used, not to mention the scripts/code to search and display, but if you have a good web engineer, that is not that hard. At the low cost end FileMakerPro can serve this need very easily and should be able to manage 3,000 images.

2) Or, you can use a DAM (Digital Asset Management software) that has all the code and will publish your database for you, including creating the proper size image files for viewing from your master images. For your small collection and access needs either Extensis Portfolio or Canto's Cumulus would work. I am in the process of writing up a review of their web publishing component, but can give you some preliminary observation. You may find a need for a web engineer to get it to work properly, but the imaging quality is very good. The search capabilities may not be adequate for your needs, although simple searches sometimes are the best.

My recommendation is to download their demos. They are fairly intuitive to use, but keep in mind that the web version does not do everything the desktop does. Canto's program does allow you to customize it more than the Extensis one does if you know Java, so you might come close to the desktop version.

Good luck and feel free to ask for more direction as you proceed.

Return to Thread list

Thread: DAM for publishing

QUESTION:Hi I'm an IT student and my group just proposed a DAM solution to a publishing company. We are having difficulties in understanding the purpose of a DAM. I've read that it is used so that assets could be repurposed. What kinds of problems does a DAM provide or can you please give me a particular instance for example in a publishing company. Thanks I really need this.

RESPONSE:DAMs do many thing, each sector needing slightly different results. In Publishing, as versus advertising, archival, museums or schools, DAMS need to be able to assist in workflow monitoring.

This means it should include version control, signing out of a file so only one person can work on it at a time, security, review procedures, etc. Once the content and image have been completed, integrated and approved for publishing, then the DAM primarily becomes a locator of the original image and Content Management software will adapt the content for each type of publishing required, CD-ROM, Print, Internet, etc. Among the programs will be a file conversion program to convert to the preferred file type. After publishing, the DAM may then be used to archive the image for future use, at that point metadata describing the use, file characteristics, and rights becomes necessary.

To get a better idea of the tools required for a DAM in publishing, examine the technical specifications for Cant's Cumulus and Artesia's TEAMs. Good luck and let me know how you do. One very key thing for any DAM is its imaging engine. You must have a fast and accurate image display.

Gert - Digital Imaging Guide
Add to thread

Thread: digitize medical images to excel

QUESTION: I need a way of capturing an entire greyscale image and converting it to numerical values for import into excel. I need the greyscale value for each x and y co-ordinate on the image. I can see a lot of software that does this manually with graphs, etc, but it there an application which does the entire (photographic) image automatically? Thanks, Shawn

RESPONSE: Can anyone else help Shawn?

Gert - Digital Image Guide
Add to thread

ARCHIVES

Thread: Digitize with limited Budget.

QUESTION:in a nutshell - what do small museums/societies do to digitize & provide public access to collections with a limited budget?

My problem: I am setting up a digital imaging & retrieval system for a group's photography collection. Collection consists of about several thousand old photos, which they want to image and put away. They have the computer, scanner, printer, cd-writer, some grant money and the (2-3 full time student) workers. They will image the photos as TIFs, save them to disk & CD and will want to cross reference the information. On a second computer, they can index the meta-data in a spreadsheet, then "join" the two pieces together in a "database".

They seem to understand the time it will take to do this, and the limitations of CDs. I've been trying to resign them to the fact that eventually they will have to convert to some other media, TBD, in the future.

I've given the curator information on Dublin Core and articles on other more ambitious intitiatives, just to get her thinking about the broader picture, and so I can set up the appropriate database fields in the target product. They want to do searches on this meta-data, and I suspect will be wanting to enter more information as time goes by.

The client base will be the general public seeking a variety of information from geneology to industrial history. The society will also want to create CDs periodically to send out to the public on portions of their collection.

Browsing the web and reading articles, I thought the most appropriate solution would be a low-end imaging database like Extensis' Portfolio or Canto's Cumulus. This gives them the ability to scale, import/export, good search capability. However, both cater to the prepress crowd more than the museum crowd. (Image AXS used to be owned by DAS, but...)

My background is technical, not "archival" - I purchased Extensis myself a year ago to manage a web's image collection, and have trialed Canto. I also own Image AXS (my first try at image mgmt), but that seems to have been orphaned in the last year. Not a whole lot of differentiation for my purposes between these products from what I can tell:

1. You can add metadata to hierarchical (category fields) in Canto (although not export it to the web)
2. You can develop both categories and galleries in Extensis.
3. Extensis has a free packaged browser, whereas Canto wants to charge.
4. Extensis would be easier to import data from Excel, but I think I could get some traction on Canto with their CSV based import - though it seems you'd have to export, build an Excel pivot table and re-import.
5. Both appear painful to extend programically in Windows unless you have a full VB environment already in place.
6. Both have limited HTML templating, I have extended the Extensis product with PHP & perl to get the HTML I really want (e.g. Dublin Core in headers, etc.)

As you noted Cumulus and Portfolio are set up for the Prepress world, but I do recommend them to any image managers who want to see collection's images as they develop their cataloging approach. Most people who need to "see" their images are those whose images are in use, not part of an archived collection. Their concern is associating data with the image which helps them "find " the image not necessarily fully describe it. As you mention using metadata and the Dublin core, I assume you want to develop a solid catalog for your images as well as develop a retrieval system. I would modify your concept to develop metadata in a database and "join " the pieces in by means of an "html or sgml " code. Check http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/BANC/Honeyman/ to see an example of this. "The Honeyman project uses the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) standard, an SGML descriptive standard maintained by the Library of Congress, and will serve, in collaboration with other MOAC participants, as a model implementation of the EAD standard for museum and special collections. "- from their site.

continue in the next collumn