Posted on 12/12/2003 10:13:35 PM PST by Swordmaker
Image Archiving
On a rainy afternoon in Washington, D.C., John Jones leans back in his chair in an office populated with Macs and watches digital images fly by on one of the displays. “The Macs are doing a lot of work while I’m talking on the phone,” he chuckles softly. “It’s an important part of our approach to archiving.”
Jones began managing images for the Smithsonian Institution when, in 1989, he joined the museum after graduate school to help catalog and preserve the work of Peter A. Juley. From 1896 to 1975, Juley and his son, Paul, operated the largest and most respected fine arts photography studio in New York City. They photographed the work and portraits of almost every major American artist including Winslow Homer, George Innes, Thomas Eakins, Grant Wood and Hans Hoffman. The collection of 127,000 images constitutes a sort of mini-history of American art.
Today, as chief image technologist in the Smithsonian Office of Imaging and Photographic Services, Jones assists in the preservation of more than two million pieces of photographic film, glass plates and digital images for the three main museums at the Smithsonian: the Air and Space Museum, Museum of Natural History and Museum of American History. All with Macs, Mac OS X, Xserve and Xserve RAID.
Digital Preservation
“We know how to keep film for a thousand years,” Jones says in a pleasant Virginia drawl. “We have a cold storage vault that will keep color negative film for at least 500 years. There is science for that. You handle film with white gloves. You don’t put it near fluids. You don’t use film in certain environments. But now that we do more digital original photography,” Jones adds, “it’s crucial that we know how to preserve digital images for the long term.”
When Jones joined the Juley project, he discovered that a database of images had been written and stored on an old mainframe computer from the 1970s. “In order to get any information about what we were doing, I had to submit a request for a report. That request had to go over to another person who would put it into a computerese request and that request would go to the operators who knew how to put this request into the computer and a couple of weeks later I would receive two three-inch binders of records that included the answer to my question. And if it happened that I had phrased the question wrong, I started the process again.”
Image Archiving
To manage the huge photographic resources for the three museums today, Jones developed an image archiving system using FileMaker Pro as the database, Macs with Xserve and Xserve RAID storage as image servers, Lasso software from Blueworld and AppleScript as a helping hand.
“Our production at some point touches digital in almost everything we do,” says Jones, “so our digital capabilities have been growing progressively over the last five years. Now we’re shooting a lot more digital originals, so having an efficient image archiving and retrieval system is of paramount importance to us.”
The Xserve and Xserve RAID units are on public display in the exhibit at the Museum of American History because they demonstrate the latest in digital printing technology.
“But I also moved the image archiving department up there,” Jones says, “because Xserve with Xserve RAID is such an incredible piece of equipment. It gives you up to 2.5 terabytes of storage per unit and it really breaks a price/performance barrier that we haven’t seen in this type of storage device before. And it’s a tremendous boost to our ability to store and retrieve images.”
Web-Accessible Database
Photographers catalog, store and retrieve images using the web-accessible database. “Through a web interface,” says Jones, “photographers select what type of object they have — film, digital original or QuickTime movie, for instance — and the database attaches a unique number to that object so we can find it later on. Then, on another web screen, users fill out key information about that object, including the name of the photographer, a brief description of the image and other details. That goes into a FileMaker database.
Automating the Process
Because so many images are processed daily, they are deposited by the different units into “Done” folders distributed around the network; in the evening, when the museum is silent, an AppleScript script goes to work processing the information.
Once images are in the database, it’s easy for anyone to use the web to locate an image by any parameter including date, photographer, subject or keyword.
AppleScript at Work
“Here’s another great thing about Apple technology — and I love to emphasize this,” says Jones, “because AppleScript has allowed us to automate a system of uploads. Every night, AppleScript runs and grabs all those images, downloads them onto the centralized server and then runs them through an ‘Image Grinder’ which processes the files and makes web display derivatives for each one.
Smithsonian Workflow
Images are saved in their original format, as full-size TIFFs and as cropped and color-corrected TIFFs, then uploaded to a FileMaker database. An AppleScript-driven Image Grinder generates JPEG copies for printing and for web pages and creates backup archive CDs.
“Then AppleScript drops them over into another folder and, at 4 a.m., another AppleScript runs. It looks at all those files and puts pertinent information such as file size, dimensions and date of creation into the FileMaker database. It’s fully automated, so the next morning when you come in, any images you dropped there yesterday are in place, online, available through the web interface of the database. You can download any image from the archive using FTP from our Apple server if you ever need it again. It’s immediately retrievable.
“It’s just a beauty,” Jones adds. “I love AppleScript. It’s such a productivity enhancer. It truly is the only integrated system-level architecture for inter-application scripting. I’m not a tech guy; I’ve got a master’s degree in photography. But I’ve been able to create what is a very functional system, just myself.”
Serving the Public
Jones’ system also is designed to serve the public more efficiently. “We sell prints from this office to anyone,” Jones says. “Someone might want a historic image of a certain Native American from the National Anthropological Archives Collection or images of contemporary tropical research done by Smithsonian scientists.
“We also have very esoteric images such as a large collection of transportation images that contains a lot of images of railroad cars that train buffs order so they know how to build their models. Others are interested in aircraft-related images such as those featured in ‘At the Controls: The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Book of Cockpits,’ a recently-published book of photographs by our photographers, Eric Long and Mark Avino.
“The Smithsonian’s collections are incredibly diverse and we maintain images of a great many of these important American artifacts. There is truly something here for everyone.”
In the early 1990s, Jones’ office worked with Apple on the Library of the Future to make images stored at the Smithsonian available to students and researchers via the web. Today the Smithsonian is in the process of creating a new site which will provide free access to screen-size JPEG images as well as sales of high-quality images.
Way to Work
A long-time Mac user, Jones says, “One of the beauties of Apple technology is that Apple computers have always been made, in my opinion, to come to you, to speak your language, rather than you having to learn some archaic computer language. That’s where the real value and the ease of use of the Macs exist for me. It’s the ability for the computer to speak your language and work in the way you want to work.
Worth a Trip
The next time you visit America’s treasure house for learning, stop by the exhibit on printing technology in the Museum of American History. At one end of the exhibit, you can see Benjamin Franklin’s press, made of unseasoned English elm, and, at the other end, a working digital lab featuring Macs and Xserve and Xserve RAID.
In addition to demonstrating the latest in digital printing technology, the Macs support the formidable digital imaging requirements for the three main museums at the Smithsonian Institution: the Air and Space Museum, Museum of Natural History and Museum of American History.
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For those who seem to think that the Macintosh has no place in large organizations and lacks robust applications.
It sounds like they're actually storing those giant TIFFs in the database. I don't think that's a good idea. It would be better to store the images as simple files and keep the file path in the database.
Otherwise, it sounds like a nice system - but I'm waiting for the G5 Xserve.
I agree. But I think the author of the article misquoted or simplified the actual process. FileMaker does not store an image but uses links to the actual file. Otherwise, the database file would become extremely difficult to handle. Care must be maintained that pathways remain static as the database expects them to be.
IIRC, FileMaker does allow the formation and storage internally of thumbnails of the actual image for quick visual browsing using small file sizes.
I've known some bozos who tried to store thousands of huge image files as BLOBs in Oracle databases, so it wouldn't be surprising to see others repeating that mistake.
What features does DB2 have for image storage?
It has been my experience that most Mac fans aren't usually that computer-technology savvy.
Yes, and that's generally true for Windows fans too. However, the project I referred to in #7 used Sun systems.
They would use a DB like FM for such a task.
I'm sure we can agree that a DB should be a DB, and an FM should be an FM.
It has been a while since I did any major databases with FileMaker Pro. (I have constructed complete applications for several companies and a couple of charities).
I just rechecked my FileMaker Pro manual. FileMaker is designed to handle any type or size of graphic, movie, sound, etc, in what are called "container fields." It can handle it either internally or externally by a reference link. Internally allows the graphic file to be copied with the database without requiring the copying of related files and folders. Externally runs the risk of having data moved from its proper location without notifying the database of the move, thus losing the access to the data. As I mentioned, Filemaker constructs a thumbnail for any external image if necessary.
The security issues have been handled since "way back when" and Filemaker has industrial strength permissions and security.
Agreed. That's how we do it in the National Digital Mammography Archive (developed at Penn, and being brought to market by i3Archive).
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