Best approach to dealing with photos

[StephenUK]

I would be grateful for advice. From time to time I download to my PC large numbers of photos. The file names have little meaning just being a sequence of numbers.

I would like to access the photographs from within UltraRecall, but need to be able to select a given photograph by looking at a thumbnail.

I find that I can use the "Open Containing Folder" command to look at photos in thumbnail format. I have also read the advice that if I store the photos in the same directory as the .urd file then I can move whole directory and relationships will be maintained.

I would be very grateful for advice as to whether I can pull the photos themselves into UR and still have the facility to see thumbnails, or whether I must merely link to them. Also, if I do have merely to link to them, will the program find them if I move them about within a directory structure that is itself in the same directory as the .urd file.

Put another way, what is the best approach to dealing with photos that lack meaningful names which are acquired in fairly large numbers so that naming each file is not practical?

Stephen

[kinook]

UR itself doesn't have thumbnail display of items. You would need to link, not store, in UR to view as thumbnails outside of UR. Moving or renaming of linked files outside of UR will lose their linkage in UR. If you need to link within UR and also display as thumbnails externally, it's probably best to organize in folders externally before linking in UR.

[StephenUK]

Thank you for that advice.

Is there any chance that future versions of UR may perhaps have thumbnails? They are very nicely implemented in WebResearch and also in Paperport, and I feel they would be very useful in UR.

Stephen

[janrif]

Originally posted by StephenUK
I would be grateful for advice. From time to time I download to my PC large numbers of photos. The file names have little meaning just being a sequence of numbers. [snip] what is the best approach to dealing with photos that lack meaningful names which are acquired in fairly large numbers so that naming each file is not practical? Stephen

What do you mean by acquired? Imported from card reader or...? Can you explain your workflow in a little more detail?

[StephenUK]

Jan

Thanks for asking.

My work involves gathering information about real estate projects. I collect lots of web pages, notes, pdfs etc which happily sit in UR under different project headings. Additionally, I frequently take perhaps 100 or so photos at a time, of a given building, and these I download to my PC. There I may sort them in Windows Explorer so they have a structure. For example, external shots and internal shots. I don't rename the files, simply accepting the numeric sequences generated by the camera software. This is not a problem provided I have thumbnails to use to locate particular shots.

Until now I have used Paperport to look at the photos, Word documents and pdfs. But I had my web pages saved in Web Research (because Paperport does not save web pages well), and my notes saved in Info Select which I have used for over twelve years. However, it was all rather fragmented.

UR seems to offer the possibility of having everything in one place, but I am struggling with the photos which are too numerous to give meaningful names to. The only sensible way to browse for them is by thumbnail. But it seems that that then precludes my importing them in to UR which is what I would like to do for the sake of homogeny.

Stephen

[janrif]

Originally posted by StephenUK
[snip] I frequently take perhaps 100 or so photos at a time, of a given building, and these I download to my PC. There I may sort them in Windows Explorer so they have a structure. For example, external shots and internal shots. I don't rename the files, simply accepting the numeric sequences generated by the camera software. This is not a problem provided I have thumbnails to use to locate particular shots.[/snip]

I assume you are shooting in jpg format on a digital camera of some kind. If so, you should take a look at a product called DownLoad Pro from Breeze http://www.breezesys.com/.

In this product you can select, delete & name all your files before you download them onto your PC. You can put these shots in a folder & import the folder. I believe URp will store file names as keywords + you can create your own keyword for all selected files <CTRL>K.

Now in URp you should be able to search for these photos by name & URp should be able to find them for you. I would have to fool around to get this to work but I think it would.

However, that doesn't solve the problem of viewing within URp. But then you could click on links, associate the file type to the best free viewer around called irfanview http://www.irfanview.com/ to see your photos.

THe sollution is a bit kludgy but URp should be able to search by name.

HTH

[quant]

Originally posted by kinook
UR itself doesn't have thumbnail display of items. You would need to link, not store, in UR to view as thumbnails outside of UR. Moving or renaming of linked files outside of UR will lose their linkage in UR. If you need to link within UR and also display as thumbnails externally, it's probably best to organize in folders externally before linking in UR.

hmmm ... I'm joining StephenUK here

I think it would be a nice (and quite useful) feature if user could set/change "View" of the related items pane, just like in the Windows explorer, eg. Details (the current customizable view where user can set attributes to display), Thumbnails (pictures and document thumbnails), and maybe also List could be useful as well.

Thank you for consideration

[StephenUK]

Jan - thank you for that. I will have a look at the software. What you suggest is indeed probably the best way to do things at the moment.

If we can get native thumbnails in UR in the future that would, of course, be marvellous. It is so hard to find one program that does everything... (and different people have different ideas as to what "everything" should be!)

Stephen

[janrif]

Originally posted by StephenUK
Jan - thank you for that. I will have a look at the software. What you suggest is indeed probably the best way to do things at the moment.

If we can get native thumbnails in UR in the future that would, of course, be marvellous.

Couldn't agree more, Stephen but in the meantime this might get some of the info into URp.

I assume you realize that if you drag/drop files from Explorer onto page a link to that file will result.

Anyway, again, good luck.

[quant]

Originally posted by StephenUK
Jan - thank you for that. I will have a look at the software. What you suggest is indeed probably the best way to do things at the moment.

after editing the names of your photos and before importing them to UR, you could use of the many free softwares that create HTML thumbnail file that you could import (store) into your photo directory (or be a base of this photo directory). This should be an ok solution if you dont add/delete photos form certain directory once you add them to UR (otherwise the HTML thumbnail file wont represent the directory structure) ...

[StephenUK]

Quant. Thank you for that. The directories I create are relatively static, so what you suggest sounds feasible.

Let us say, therefore, that I create a directory structure which contains the photos. I then generate, using another program, some thumbnails for each directory presumably sitting in the relevant directory.

What do I do then? Can I import the thumbnails as a single file for each directory, into UR, and use the thumbnail to point to the relevant photo? Or would I just link to the thumbnail file?

Is there a thumbnail program you would recommend for this?

Stephen

[janrif]

Originally posted by quant
after editing the names of your photos and before importing them to UR, you could use of the many free softwares that create HTML thumbnail [snip]

Hmmm... clever idea. Then it could be seen in browser. I wonder if picassa (google freeware) would work for this ?

[quant]

Originally posted by StephenUK
Let us say, therefore, that I create a directory structure which contains the photos. I then generate, using another program, some thumbnails for each directory presumably sitting in the relevant directory.

I think it's even better, if the HTML created page is "THE" directory where you'd store the original photos, instead of having another directory item just called Photos.

What do I do then? Can I import the thumbnails as a single file for each directory, into UR, and use the thumbnail to point to the relevant photo? Or would I just link to the thumbnail file?[/B]

Import (store) the created html file and store the original files in it. Unfortunately, that's all you can do ... the html links won't work cause you'd store the photos in UR, but you'd have name in case you need to see the photo full-size. And linking inside of UR is useless because you'd store the original files under the html file, so the relation is clear.

Is there a thumbnail program you would recommend for this?
[/B]

Picassa would do (export to html option) ...

[quant]

simple example ... http://www.sendspace.com/file/eokrta

[ashwken]

IrfanView will create an html thumbnail page from selected images.

From the Thumbnail module File | Save Selected as HTML - from this dialog there's a bunch of different parameters, very comprehensive.

http://www.irfanview.com/

If you want to rename your files in some type of meaningful way you might want to look at Lupas Rename:

http://rename.lupasfreeware.org

Lupas also allows you to pull many of the tags present in digital images into the filename - also works with audio file tags.

By the way, I'm using UR in conjunction with a Real Estate office also, and this solution for handling images is very clever and useful.

Later,
KenA