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Frequently asked questions Technical notes |
Why is thumbnail selection so odd? Where do I make and find galleries? |
How many people can I put in one element? What is the point of saying what I can’t see? |
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Digital image management for film photographers
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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! 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. This takes some getting used to because, in most Windows programs, if you select a filename, the first is deselected at the same time. To select several at a the time, other programs require you to hold down the Shift or Ctrl key. ViewMinder does it differently to make it easy to select several pictures scattered all over the Tray. It’s awkward to have to hold down the Shift or Ctrl button at the same time, especially if you have to scroll down at the same time. One slip of your finger and you must start again. With ViewMinder a thumbnail is not deselected until you click it a second time. You can quickly select the pictures that you want to accept or delete or describe or export. It’s easy to select a large number of pictures, even if they are not next to each other. 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 way of selecting pictures, open the Settings box, under the menu item Edit. Click the Advanced tab and then the checkbox Windows selection style. Now clicking thumbnails will select them one at a time, and you'll need to hold down the Shift or Ctrl keys to select several. 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 each location element too. 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 you can then find them separately. Otherwise you put them together. 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: Sometimes you might even put people together if they have the same
name: 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 I can’t see? Unseen means that the picture doesn’t show it. It may seem odd to write about things that aren’t in the picture but in fact it lets you record interesting extra information about people, places and things. You could describe an ice hockey team as winners of the Stanley Cup, a friend as father of Timmy, 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 the system for classifying pictures, used by ViewMinder, is better that 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 add as much information you like about the history, origins or consequences of anything in the picture, without creating the impression that the picture shows more than it does. ViewMinder’s Simple search ignores what is written in the Unseen fields of any elements. To look at unseen fields, you 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 was standing should often be in Unseen. This is obviously true if a picture of Manhattan island is taken from the space shuttle. But if Times Square is photographed from Broadway, quite a lot of Broadway may be visible too. 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 even 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 needed by news, sports and business photographers as a way of grouping pictures linked by 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 this doesn’t mean that event is useless for everyone else. An event element called Mary’s birthday party 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 party. But by describing it as an event, you will also be able to search for the word party and find all the party pictures you've taken. John fishing in Lake Woebegone probably belongs in a person element. But Lake Woebegone Fishing Competition sounds like a promising event. 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 could backup the storage folder of ViewMinder. Its location is probably C:/Program Files/ViewMinder/storage Your picture descriptions are valuable, too. They are in the database viewminder.db, probably located in the folder C:/Program Files/ViewMinder/. In fact ViewMinder makes a backup of this file automatically, every time you close down. If it later finds that main database is corrupted, it loads the backup file instead. |
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Technical notes |
Picture resolution – a brief guide Digital pictures are composed of pixels. A pixel is a single dot of color so 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 you can make a sharp print of 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 that combine 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 print your photos you need a real 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 also 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.
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| 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 BMP Vector WMF BMP and WMF in ViewMinder Compression Lossless vs. lossy 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 JPG
Its disadvantages:
PNG
Its main drawback is that natural photographs produce larger files in PNG than in JPG. But its compression of drawings is good. TIFF
Its drawbacks
JPG, PNG and TIFF with ViewMinder 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 others later insist on receiving images in TIFF, you can convert them back while exporting them. No detail will be lost.
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| 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, 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 can also disappear in an instant; it’s rare but possible. But the trouble with film is that it can’t be properly protected when 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. |
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