I have a lot of digital photos. I’m on my fifth digital camera and I haven’t taken a picture with a camera using film in more than six years. My archive has almost 10,000 pictures. All my pictures are on my home server. I would like to have them all indexed and in a database (very time consuming). So this weekend I looked around for a way to automate the process.
It was easy to get all the file names into a database. I dumped all the file names to a text file using a command prompt trick.
DIR /S C:\PICURES>MyPictures.TXT
That saved all the names into a text file. I then imported that into my SQL server. (I’ll skip those details.)
Then I setup a web page to connect to that database. I can search for a picture (by file name) and display it. The problem came when I tried to show thumbnails of a list of search matches. Most of my pictures are bigger than 1024×768. If there are ten matches to a search, it takes a long time to show those big pictures in a preview list. (My parents only have dial-up and they will be looking at these pictures.) I needed something that would automatically shrink the pictures to thumbnails.
I did some Googling and I found several freebies. The one I ended up using was ASP Thumb. I use Windows Servers and ASP scripting, so it works with the technologies I have and understand.
Now when I search, this utility resizes each picture to a 100×80 thumbnail. These show up on the screen very quickly. When I click on a thumbnail, it shows the full sized picture.
Now I just need to put the full descriptions into the database. I set it up so that I can record the event (when/where the pic was taken) and the people in the picture. I just need some people with free time on their hands to enter everything. I think I’ll write it up and put it out to bid. I have four kids… and they are always looking for ways to make a little extra cash.