What to do with 2000 Random Photo Assets
Recently I had the opportunity of working on the beginnings of a project that involved transferring reference information from a set of books into a searchable website. The real kick was when the client revealed her thousands of image assets organised on her desktop in what can only be described as a category 5 hurricane of file folders. The thousands of image files contained in those folders were an jumbled up mess of everything from tiny 30X30 px BMP’s to massive TIFF files and all named incoherently. In this state these assets were useless so I needed to find a way to make them work in a web application.
Organizing and Renaming
One of our main focuses of this project was to get the information in a searchable database, the way I planned on doing that was to first get the information to an excel spreadsheet to make it more manageable. Through some helpful internet searching I found an excellent pre-made script that scraped all the files for their files names and put them into an excel spreadsheet.
Scraping all the file names together also had a secondary purpose. As you recall our file nomenclature was a horrendous, so bad that Windows would reject some of the files for being too long when transferred. Conglomerating everything in to one reference file allows us to retain the original file name in order to give a smaller reference file name to each file.
File size and type
A good answer to this problem took a while to come to me, however after a few failed attempts and some traveling in the wrong direction I was able to use the image processor in Photoshop to automate resizing every image and save it as jpeg in a decent size. Barring a few hiccups this worked really well and I was able to reformat all the images relatively easily.
Looking Forward
The project is ongoing but the plan would be to continue on and get all the photos and there descriptions into an excel spreadsheet. Once we have all the basic information in the excel spreadsheet there would be more things added to the sheet that would delineate certain categories as well as searchable terms. The final stage of this would be to transform the master excel spreadsheet into either some kind of API style database or an SQL database that is easily searchable.
Conclusion
Assets can be tricky and you may find yourself having to deal with unconventional situations. Hopefully my findings and my process can help someone else figure things out or even perhaps find a better way.
Brian Nelson is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Web & App Development. The following article relates to a project that involved a practicum project to design a website to help catalog costuming information for a dance company in the DGM 270R Course and representative of the skills learned.
