On Fri, 1 Aug 1997, Gert van Cappellen wrote:

> After the lively discussion of how to store gigabytes of image I'm
> interested to know how people keep track of there files. What
> archiving programs (with thumbnails and a short description?) are
> used or are you just storing the files?
> We are planning an upgrade of the image facilities in our faculty and
> this is one of the problems we may solve.
>
> Thanks,
> Gert van Cappellen

Dear Gert

I have been using a small, cheap program (about 35 british pounds if I
remember correctly) called virtual disk.  It creates a new icon on the
desktop, that feels and behaves like another hard disk.  Every time you
remove a removable medium (floppy, CD, jazz, jip etc) it keeps a list of
its directory (if you want) in a separate folder for each disk. It is
fully programmable, so you choose what you want to keep. Then you use the
standard Mac search facilities to locate a file name in the virtual disk,
and if you click on it, it asks for the correct removable to be inserted.
The direrctories of CDs that are not changable any longer, can be
reogranised within their folder, so that relevant files are kept together,
although they might appear in defferent order on the CD.  You can't create
folders with files from different CDs, it gets confused.

Obviously, this is not an image database, so you can not see thumpnails
etc, but it keeps all your files you have ever created "on-line".

For an image dtabase we use fetch from Adobe. It is not great, but it does
what we want. Our main problem is its speed, since it is not a PC native
version (it didn't exist up to 9 months ago). It recognises many
file formats, and it is at its best with Photoshop files.  NIH Image
stacks are recognised, but you only see the first slice, which is
usually ...black.  Keywords and descriptions can be kept.

If anyone on the list has any recommedations about image databases, I
would like to hear them.

Hope it helps.

Regards,


************************ PLEASE NOTE NEW ADDRESS *****************************

Dr. Stamatis Pagakis                                    [log in to unmask]
Confocal and Image Analysis Laboratory              [log in to unmask]
Division of Membrane Biology                   Tel: +44 (0)181 9593666 x 2621
National Institute for Medical Research        Also at: x2622, x2219
The Ridgeway, Mill Hill, London NW7 1AA        FAX: +44 (0)181 906 4477