🚀 go-pugleaf

Commercial Image Databases tend to be skewed to serving specific markets,
and very very few are any good for a more general market such as long-term
archiving and photo-bank. Most Image Database packages on the market are
designed as Pre-press automation tools. They key off automatic features of
images such as file name, file type, size, resolution and colourspace.

If you're really lucky they will let you assign keywords that you can
search for.

They fall down because there is an assumption that the primary user is
looking for an image that they know exists in the collection. If you don't
know what image you are looking for, but are after candidate images for a
project, then they are pretty useless.

To cover our needs (product shot library) we developed our own system,
running on UNIX, using CGI's talking to a SQL database (in this case
MySQL). ImageMagick was used for format conversion and creating previews
and positionals. Other code was written to extract information about scans
in various formats (ie image size, colour depth)

The database is fully searchable. They key difference is that we don't use
keywords. Instead each image has a number of attributes that the operator
importing the image has to full out. These attributes are not concrete, but
are designed to remind the operator of the kind of information we need
associated with an image. For the Product shot database this is things like
brand and model number. Each image also has a sentance long description of
what is in the picture. This description is where the key to success
lies--instead of trying to extract fuzzy information from the picture like
dominant colour, the operator types in what the picture is. ie. "Red
Stapler on blue background".

Any text associated with an image, ie all the text from the attributes and
the description is indexed against the image.

The primary interface for searching for images is the full text search. if
I want a picture of a Red Stapler, I simply search for "+red +stapler". The
search engine uses infoseek style modifiers, an implicite OR with no
operator, + for "must include" terms, and "-" for must not include terms.
+red +stapler" is the logical equivalent for "red AND stapler" but is
easier to humans to grok.

You can see the Image Database at <http://image.techniche.co.nz>. It is
currenly being developed to be more generic.

It's intended user base is in two areas. The first are marketing and
general office staff searching for images to use in flyers, promotions and
catalogues. They generaly use underspec'd PC's and have no idea of the
Technical aspects of images. The second are pre-press operators who need to
check images for technical useability.

There are workflows desgined around the Image Database to automate image
use etc. that I won't go into here.

There are commerical engines that are similar to the Image Database, such
as the system from Cascade Systems in England.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Knuckey                                    rknuckey@techniche.co.nz
Technology Manager                                        DDI +649 573 5923
Techniche, a division of Blue Star Print Group Limited    Fax +649 573 1803