Frequently asked questions

Technical notes

How can I save images in RAW format?

Why is thumbnail selection so odd?

Where do I find galleries?

How do I search for a country?

What do I write for Name if I don’t know?

How many people belong in one element?

What is the point of recording what can’t be seen?

When is an Action an Event?

How do I make back-ups?

Picture resolution

Digital picture terms

Digital image management for  film photographers

Does my digital camera use the File system or TWAIN?

When you import pictures into ViewMinder, this is one of the questions that the Import wizard asks. The answer will be in your camera’s manual. If you don't know where the manual is, the quick way is to try both alternatives and see which one works!

How can I save pictures in RAW format?

RAW is a format intended for digital photography professionals. It lets you save images as they are created on the sensor of your camera, before they have been de-mosaiced and gamma-corrected. You can then change their white balance afterwards, and create images of a desired mood and color temperature.

ViewMinder would support the RAW format because of its technical superiority, except for one drawback. The optimal software for displaying and adjusting RAW images depends on the digital camera's sensor. In other words, the RAW format varies from camera to camera.

Until the format becomes standardized, you will get the best results from RAW files if you use the software that came with the camera. In the meantime, there is a workaround if you need the unrivalled power of ViewMinder as an image organizer:

1. Import your RAW files onto a certain drive of your PC - say /Shared Pictures/VMraw - giving them any filenames you like, for example consecutive numbers - 1, 2, 3, 4...

2. Using your camera's software, generate JPGs of the same name.

3. Import these JPGs into ViewMinder, which will record the original file name at the same time.

When, in future, you search your collection and find an image showing what you are looking for, but with the wrong color temperature or definition, you can see the original filename, so you know exactly where the full RAW file is.

Where are all the pictures I’ve imported?

If you’ve imported pictures but can’t see them in Browse mode, it probably means that you have not yet accepted the pictures in Check mode. The pictures that are waiting to be checked cannot be seen in other modes. The aim is to let you look through new pictures, deleting any that you don’t like and maybe editing some to improve them. Then, when you Accept the picture, it disappears from the Check mode tray and enters your collection.

Why is thumbnail selection so odd?

When you click a thumbnail in the tray, it is selected and it remains selected until you click it again. If you click other thumbnails, they are added to the selection. A thumbnail is not deselected until you click it a second time.

In most Windows programs, if you select a second filename, the first is deselected, unless you are holding down the Shift or Ctrl key.

ViewMinder makes it easier to select pictures scattered all over the Tray. It can be awkward to hold down the Shift or Ctrl at the same time, especially if you also have to scroll down. One slip of your finger and you must start again.

If you want to select thumbnails one by one, you don't have to click each twice. Simply hold down the Ctrl key as you click a thumbnail. At the same time as it is selected, any others will be deselected.

If, at the end of the day, you just don’t like ViewMinder’s method of selecting pictures, open the Settings box, under the menu item Edit. Click the Advanced tab and then the checkbox Windows selection style.

Where do I make and find galleries?

A gallery is the same as a saved search. Most picture organizers make galleries by copying pictures into different folders, but with ViewMinder you use a search.

For example, you could create a gallery for pictures of Angela Frost, by creating an Advanced search: Person - Name - contains - "Angela Frost"

Click the Search button to make sure it’s working. If it is, click the Save button. You'll probably name the gallery Angela Frost. Now, by clicking Saved searches and choosing the gallery named Angela Frost, you can quickly see all her pictures.

Best of all, this is a dynamic gallery, meaning that when you add new pictures of Angela Frost to your collection, they will automatically appear in this gallery.

How do I search for a country?

This information is stored in the Creation country field, but it is stored in the form of a list of all the countries of the world. ViewMinder's database remembers the international code of the country, not its name.

The advantage is that you can search without having to remember what you called the country - for example United Kingdom or Great Britain, United States or USA. You can also search through pictures created by other people, without worrying about the language they used to explain the country of creation.

The disadvantage is that you can't find a picture with a simple search by just typing in the country name - unless you make a point of adding the country's name to location elements.

So the surest way to find pictures from a certain country is via the Advanced Search. Choose Search mode (Menu – Mode – Search) and click the Search button. Then click the Advanced search tab. From the first pull-down list, select General content - creation country - is - and then the name of the country from the list.

What do I write for Name if I don’t know?

Nothing. Names are for just that – forenames, middle names, family names, patronymics, even pet names or nicknames like "Scarface" – but not for descriptions. Young guests at Marjorie’s retirement party should be written in the Seen field, not in the name field.

Can I put several people into one Person element?

As a general rule, it makes sense to put people in separate elements because then you can find them separately.

But you can put several people in the same element is if you don’t want to name them, perhaps because you aren’t sure who they all are:

Seen: Members of Parliament in the main chamber or
Seen: Three small boys building a sandcastle or
Seen: Real Madrid football team

Sometimes you might even put people together if they have the same name:

Title: Mr and Mrs    Name: Smith
Title: Ambassador and Mrs    Name: Kavoloika

But if names are available, separating people into different elements allows more advanced picture searches. This becomes increasingly useful as your picture collection grows.

What is the point of saying what can’t be seen?

At first it seems odd to write about things that aren’t in the picture but it lets you record interesting extra information about people, places and things. You could describe a hockey team as winners of the Stanley Cup, a friend as father of Timmy or a cathedral as built after the Great Fire of London. But because all this information is marked as unseen, it is clear that the pictures don’t show the Stanley Cup, Timmy or the Great Fire of London.

This is one of the ways in which ViewMinder's system for classifying pictures is better than the old method of sorting pictures by keywords. With ViewMinder you can even turn your picture collection into a diary, describing your day around the pictures that you took.

How do I divide the description between Seen and Unseen?

Unseen lets you write as much as you like about a picture's origins, consequences or other linkages, without implying that they are shown.

ViewMinder’s Simple search ignores what is written in the Unseen fields of any elements. To find information in unseen fields, you must use an Advanced Search.

The distinction between seen and unseen is not scientific and sometimes it is not clear what belongs where. For example, location should be what a photograph shows, so where the photographer is standing is often in Unseen. This is obviously true if a picture of Manhattan is taken from the space shuttle.

But if you photograph Times Square from Broadway, quite a lot of Broadway may show too. Then you decide for yourself  - if someone was looking for a picture of Broadway, would they want to find this?

When does an action become an Event?

An event means that something is happening. Or perhaps not happening, as in the Great Saharan Drought or New York’s power blackout. Its hard to take a picture that doesn’t contain some kind of event.

The event element is used by news, sports and business photographers as a way of grouping pictures around an important theme, like the Gulf War, or a football series, or a board meeting. It’s up to organizations to define the events that they regard as important, and tell their photographers.

But event elements are useful for other photographers, too. Mary’s birthday parties is a great way of identifying pictures that are personally important. You could even put this in an Element set so that it is easy to add to pictures taken at different times.

Another method would be to create a group called Mary’s birthday parties. But by describing it as an event, you will also be able to search for the word parties and find all your the party pictures.

John fishing in Lake Woebegone probably belongs in a person element. But Lake Woebegone Fishing Competition sounds like a promising event.

How do I make back-ups?

The most thorough way is to back up all the files on your computer using a Windows backup routine or some other computer utility. You will then have an extra copy of all your pictures, all their descriptions and every ViewMinder setting.

To safeguard just your pictures - your image files - you can backup the storage folder of ViewMinder. Its location is probably C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Pictures\VMcollection

Your picture descriptions are valuable, too. They are in the database viewminder.db, probably located in the folder C:/Program Files/ViewMinder/.

ViewMinder makes a backup of the database file automatically, every time you close down. If it later finds that the database is corrupted, it loads the backup file instead. But by making separate backups, you can protect yourself against a fixed disc failure that would wipe out everything on your computer. It's unlikely but possible.

Technical notes

Digital picture terms

Digital image management for film photographers

Picture resolution – a brief guide

Digital pictures are composed of pixels. A pixel is a single dot of color. The more detail you want to show, the more pixels you require.

Imaging phones usually take pictures at VGA size – that is, 640 x 480 = 307200 pixels. The pictures look good on monitors, which display images at low resolution – less than 100 pixels per inch. VGA pictures are therefore fine for the web.

But if you try to make a picture from an imaging phone into normally sized photo print – 15 by 10 centimeters or 6 by 4 inches – it will look blurred and blotchy. The pixels will be spread out too thinly to give the impression of continuous tone. Photorealistic printers usually lay down 100 pixels per centimeter (240 pixels per inch), so the maximum size for a sharp print from a VGA picture is 6.4 by 4.8 cm or 2.6 by 2 inches.

Some printers proclaim that they print 600 dots per centimeter (1440 dots per inch). However, each dot is one of six different colors placed on top of each other to create the pixel color required, so the resulting number of pixels is still only 100 per centimeter (240 per inch).

To be able to make normal-sized prints of your photos you need a better camera, digital or film. If a digital camera promises 3-5 megapixels, you will be able to print crisp normal-sized photographs. News photographers use digital cameras for even larger pictures, because of speed and convenience, and because the paper on which newspapers are printed gives fairly poor print quality anyway.

Many professional photographers prefer film because of the extra resolution – that is, the ability to record more detail. You can not only print the whole picture at larger sizes. You can enlarge a small area of it, for example to extract the face of an individual from a group of people.

A digital image of up to 20 megapixels is needed to reproduce all the visual information in a 35mm negative or slide. So film still provides more resolution than most digital cameras.

More doesn’t mean better, though. A picture of 3-5 megapixels is fine for most purposes, it is quick to process and view and it doesn’t use up a lot of storage space.

Digital picture terminology

Pixels
A digital picture - the kind that can be displayed on a computer screen - consists of a large number of colour dots, called pixels.

Raster
Raster is a way of turning a natural picture into a digital image. The picture is divided into horizontal lines, each composed of pixels. Each pixel has a position and a colour. A raster image file contains the coordinates and colours of every pixel.

BMP
"Bitmap" is the simplest kind of raster format. A BMP file contains a list of the coordinates and colours of each pixel. The format was developed by Microsoft for its Windows operating system.

Vector
A picture that has been drawn - a plan, diagram, map or logo - often contains geometric shapes. Instead of describing, say, a box by dividing it into horizontal lines, you could record the coordinates of each corner and the colour that fills it. This is the principle of a vector file. For simple drawings it is much smaller than a raster file. It can also easily be scaled up or down. By changing the coordinates you change the size of the box.

WMF
"Windows metafile" is the native vector file format for Microsoft Windows. To display a WMF file, a program converts it to a raster image.

BMP and WMF in ViewMinder
ViewMinder can import files in BMP and WMF formats. In Settings (Menu - Edit - Settings - File formats) you determine whether the files are kept unchanged or converted. If the incoming files are WMF line drawings, the images will stay crisper as such. If they are BMP pictures, you will save space on your computer by converting into PNG or JPG..

Compression
In the bitmap format, graphic (colour and position) information is not compressed in any way. This can be extremely wasteful. Consider a picture of the flag of France. The BMP format would separately record the position and colour of every pixel. The file would be much smaller if it simply stated that every pixel in the left third was blue, every pixel in the right third blue and everything in the middle white. This is one kind of compression; others can be much more sophisticated.

Lossless vs. lossy
There are two types of compression for raster images. If the compression is lossless, the original picture can be restored perfectly from the compressed file. Even if you compressed and decompressed it 100 times, it would be the same.

If compression is lossy, some information is lost every time, though it may be too small to notice. The advantage of lossy compression is that file sizes are generally much smaller.

Compression in ViewMinder
ViewMinder supports three compressed formats. JPG is lossy while PNG and TIFF are lossless.

JPG
"Jay-peg" works best on realistic pictures in full colour or monochrome - in other words, ordinary photographs. Its advantages:

1. A bitmap file of 2 MB can easily be slimmed down to 100 KB with no noticeable deterioration. Your fixed drive can take 20 times more pictures, and you can transmit a picture 20 time faster.
2. It can be displayed by any browser, so everyone can see your pictures

Its disadvantages:

1. Lossy. Colours are changed slightly and, at high levels of compression, pictures they will look blotchy
2. JPG is not kind to logos, drawings and pictures that have text captions. Image containing clear straight lines and blocks of colour may look blurred.

PNG
"Ping" is an international format adopted in 1996 to replace the old Graphics Interchange Format (GIF). Its advantages:

1. Lossless, so it is better for high-quality work than JPG.
2. Unlike JPG, it suits line drawings as well as photographs, so it is the preferred format for diagrams, logos, etc
3. PNG can be displayed by all main browsers, so everyone can see your pictures.

Its main drawback is that PNG files of natural photographs are larger files than JPG files. But PNG compression of drawings is good.

TIFF
"Tiff" is the format traditionally used for high-quality archive images of all types. Its advantages:

1. Lossless so it is better for high-quality work than JPG.
2. Supported by many scanners and digital cameras, so it is a good intermediate format.

Its drawbacks

1. Uncompressed TIFF files are very large. There are various compression methods but they are not supported by all programs. ViewMinder does not read compressed TIFF.
2. Not widely supported by browsers
3. Not a streaming format, which means that the whole file has to be received before you can start viewing it.

JPG, PNG and TIFF with ViewMinder
JPG compression at high quality is ideal for storing most photographs. You can change the compression in the program settings ((Menu - Edit - Settings - File formats). For artwork and professional quality images, PNG is better. But if your digital camera produces images in JPG, you will not get better quality by converting them into PNG. Only the file sizes will grow.

Changing the amount of compression of PNG images (Menu - Edit - Settings - File formats) has no effect on the quality of the image. Higher compression just takes longer.

TIFF is a useful intermediate format for transferring lossless images to ViewMinder. For many digital cameras, TIFF is the only lossless format available so if image quality is very important, this is the choice to make. But you will save disc space and lose no quality if you let ViewMinder convert and save these pictures in PNG. If tour friends or clients later insist on receiving images in TIFF, you can convert them back while exporting them. No detail will have been lost.

Digital image management for film photographers

Images on film are generally superior in terms of both resolution and durability, but images are far easier to manage, manipulate and distribute if they are in digital form. ViewMinder offers a way to get the best of both worlds.

The biggest headache faced by film photographers is managing their archives. Even the laborious approach of a filing card for every picture fails to achieve what is easy on computers – instant sorts and searches.

Apart from high resolution, the advantage of film is that its life span has been tested. It is stable and, if protected from light, dust and abrasion, it will remain in the same condition for at least fifty years. By then some CDs may have crumbled into dust. Images stored on a computer drive can also disappear in an instant; it’s rare but possible.

But the trouble with film is that it can’t be properly protected in day-to-day use. Copies must be made for display or distribution, and they too have to be filed and managed. Digital images, on the other hand, can be copied perfectly in seconds, at the resolution required. They can be sent to users electronically and deleted when no longer needed.

One solution is produce images on film, to make digital copies of them by scanning the film, to catalogue the digital copies using ViewMinder, and to file the film originals. In this way you have a digital version that can be instantly retrieved and copied when needed and you also have a version on film as the ultimate backup and proof of ownership.

Print scanners are cheaper than film scanners but your digital images will be poorer in quality if they are made by scanning prints. The resolution of a scanned print will be good enough for web publishing (see Picture resolution) but not for quality reprinting. Also prints are a poor archive medium.

35mm film can be scanned at up to 4000 dpi. There are several compact film scanners on the market capable of this. The result will produce a useful image (after the edges have been trimmed) of about 5400 x 3600 pixels or 18.5 megapixels. If you order the scanning from a professional laboratory, this precision of scanning is generally referred to as Pro format.

(Kodak calls this resolution base 64 because it “contains 64 times the detail of a normal television picture”. The highest resolution offered on normal Kodak Photo CDs is base 16. Base 64 is obtainable on the more expensive Kodak Pro Photo CD.)

Film resolution depends on size, consistency and density of the grains in the film that provide its color. These matters cannot be expressed merely in terms of pixel numbers, so there is no simple correspondence between analogue and digital resolution. For practical purposes, though, there is no extra detail to be obtained by scanning 35mm film at more than 4000 dpi.

On the other hand, you may decide that you will rarely need digital images as large as 18.5 megapixels, which are capable of being printed photo-realistically at 34 by 46 centimeters or 22½ by 15 inches. And, if you ever do, you can always scan the film original again.

Large images not only take up more space on your hard disc but also take more processing time whenever ViewMinder needs to show a preview of them. To save space and time, you could scan your 35mm film at just 2000 dpi. This will create a useful image of about 2700 by 1800 pixels, about 4.6 megapixels but still capable of being printed as large as 27 by 23 centimeters or 11 by 7½ inches.

After scanning, the film should be placed in safe storage. Film strips – usually of four or six pictures at a time – can be held in slip-in pages of acid-free paper, ready perforated for filing in ring binders. Transparent plastic slip-in pages are also available but their purpose – that the film can be seen without removing it – is unnecessary once the pictures are in ViewMinder.

There is no point cutting up the strips into individual pictures or mounting them as slides: this would make it harder to rescan if you need to. It does not matter if the strip contains unsuccessful pictures that you aren’t using. They take up hardly any space and may be useful anyway at some future time.

When the scanned image has been imported into ViewMinder, in its Check mode, a window will open that lets you write the location in your archives of the original film (or print). For example you could write Volume A page 38 row D number 4 or just A38D4. This information will now be linked to the image in ViewMinder’s database.

To see it, adjust the field information in ViewMinder’s Settings (Menu – Edit – Settings, or Ctrl-G) Make sure that the Original filename box is checked under Technical data.

If you are using another image editing program to prepare the image before importing it into ViewMinder, save the ready image to your fixed disk using a name that describes its location, such as Volume A page 38 row D number 4 or A38D4. ViewMinder will read this filename into its database when you import the image.