I'm an amateur photographer and I have a problem with storing my files.
I have a drive (actually 2 hard drives for safety reasons) where I keep all of my personal photos. It's simple structure: year -> date -> raw, jpg (straight from camera/phone), edited (if I edited and exported any raws). After owning better quality camera for a few years the size of all of this is getting huge so I'd like to delete all raw files (I hope I won't need them after a few years. These aren't paid projecs. Just me, my family, friends, landscapes, etc.). Of course I have to automate that :) What's the best way to do it?
Additionally it'd be awesome if I could also automaticaly lower a bit the quality of 20mb jpgs to get some more free space. Is it possible to do that in photoshop while maintaining folder structure?
If you have any tips for storing photos, let me know!
Thanks in advance!
Kacper
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I am trying to find a software solution that will allow our group to easily upload datasets (scriptable and or through some UI), tag those datasets, retrieve those datasets, access control for the datasets, search the tags, search the files name/attributes/metadata (e.g. file creation date). The datasets can be anything from CSV files, image(binary) datasets, texts, server logs, folders within folders of images, zip files of csv data. It can be anything. We will need to be storing GBs to potentially PBs of data. A single file can range from a few KB to 100's of GB. Usable API to retrieve these datasets programmatically.
We just want to have a centralized location of finding information and we want to be able to answer a question such as "Hey do you know if we have any lightening strike datasets?" If there is a file/folder/zip file tagged with "lightening" when I search it should pull back that dataset.
A possible solution would be something like Dataverse, Dspace, Fedora Commons, CKAN. However, those seem to be really geared towards academia and publications or small datasets. On top of that they remove any type of complex folder structure that might exist (e.g. Folder1-->subFolder1-->subFolder2). I also question the scalability of having a 10 million 100kb files within one of these systems.
A filesystem share would allow us to simply store whatever we want but I don't know of a reasonable way of enabling tagging of data.
It is almost like I am looking for a combination of the two. Does someone know of a tool preferably open source that would be able to do something like this?
From what you have described so far, DSpace does seem to be a good fit.
With following examples I want to address the concerns you raised:
Scalability
Here's an example of a multi-terabyte item:
https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/14881
Complex structure
Dryad is based on DSpace and uses a more complex data model, with data files, data packages and the original publication each being represented as separate objects:
http://datadryad.org/resource/doi:10.5061/dryad.322vn
If that's what you want, you can also start your project off the Dryad codebase, since this one is open source as well:
https://github.com/datadryad/dryad-repo
I'm open to other solutions as well.
My issue is this. We have about 500+ and growing different PDFs that need to have certain information (company info, phone numbers, etc.) added to form fields dynamically. The reason this needs to be dynamic is that this information changes regularly and we do not want to have to update all 500 PDFs each time it changes. So I am looking for some way to set up the PDFs so that they all read from a single external source (could be something as simple as a text file) dynamically upon opening the PDF in Acrobat Pro.
I have done some on-the-fly PDF creation in the past through PHP, however this does not seem like the best solution here as the PDFs need to be edited a lot by non-programmers and such. I'd prefer not to go that route and just stick to finding a way to get a few lines of data into the PDFs they create.
I've researched this a bit and it seems... possible, but confusing? This is the best thing I could find so far:
http://www.pdfscripting.com/public/department48.cfm
But the three solutions that it offers near the bottom all sound convoluted. Just wondering if there is something simpler that I am missing. All I really need to do is have the PDF import a few small chunks of text. Seems like it should be easy...
I think you can give http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/679606/Filling-PDF-Form-using-iText-PDF-Library a try. Hopefully it fulfills your needs.
I'm writing an iOS applications that saves Music albums(just an exercise I'm doing for the fun of it) .
For every Album there's a singer, song names, time, and a picture
The final result will be a lot of objects with a lot of details including a picture attached to every object. Should I even consider doing something like that with plist? (can pictures be stored in a plist?)
What's the best way to save and access that data?
I'm new to iOS and from the training videos I've seen Core Data is not recommend for the beginner user. Is that really the case?
If I'm going with plist, should I create one plist for every genre for example rap.plist , rock.plist etc' or just a big data.plist?
Thanks
I would go for core data. If you choose the right template when you create your new project in xcode then reduce the once-off overhead work significantly.
With that simple structure I would say that the templates provides nearly everything you need. Just define your model and layout and off you go.
There is just the images where I would spend a bit more time in thinking it over. I personally never put the image data into core data itself. I rather stored them as file and within my core data model I just stored the path and filename to access it. As file name I simply used a timestamp. You could use some auto-increment or other unique id technique but a time stamp would do as well. It will not be visible to the user anyway.
I think the best way you can do this, since you are new to IOS is by using sqlite. Save all the information you want in your local database and display it on the screen.
You can use plist if you have data structure that is small.
Note that property lists should be used for data that consists primarily
of strings and numbers. They are very inefficient when used with large blocks
of binary data. A property list is probably the easiest to maintain, but it will be loaded into memory all at once. This could eat up a lot of the device's memory.
With Sqlite you will easily be able delete , edit, insert your data into the database.
Core data also uses sqlite for data storage only it helps you to manage your data objects, their relationships and dependencies with minimal code.
And since your are new getting started with core data would not be such a good idea i think.. so i would suggest start off with normal sqlite. Save the data in one of your folders of your app and store their path in the database.
You dont have to write different plists.. You can use the same one if you are using.
EDIT : here is a link that will help you with learning sqlite
http://www.iosdevelopment.be/sqlite-tutorial/
you need some more code to set up the core data stack (the store coordinator, the store, the object model, and a context)
it is a tad more complicated but that shouldnt scare you off.
Reading a plist is indeed dead easy but while good for smaller data (like the info.plist) it doesnt scale and soon you need a fullblown DB
As you edited your original question an decided to go with plist now.
In that case I would go for one plist per ablum and one overall plist for the list of albums.
You could, of course, use more plists for categories etc.
However, if you are thinking of data structures like categories you are far better off with core data. Especially when it comes to searching.
No one seems to be mentioning SQLLite, I would go that way and for reasons that I explain here ( https://stackoverflow.com/a/12619813/1104563 ). Hope this helps!
coredata is a apple provided persistant tool, while plist is XML file. The reason why core data is not recommended for beginner, I think, is core data is more difficult than plist from programming perspective. For your application, obviously core data is more suitable. But alternatively, you may also use archive file, that's between core data and plist.
I need your advise on this, I'm currently developing a kinda family application.(Everything relates to the family)
I would like to add something similar to a family tree or the family members. (Using Table view) and each member/element on the list will have its own "view" containing a 50 words biography about him and his photo.
Since, I'm still new to iOS development and I still haven't worked with SQLite yet. Do you guys think SQLite is the best for this job? How about the photos. Is there a way to put a thumbnail photo for each member?
SQLite does this well, though Core Data is generally considered the preferred iOS technology. There are a few situations where I might advise using SQLite over Core Data, but you haven't outlined any app requirements that would make me lean that direction.
If you do your own SQLite, though, I'd suggest you use something like FMDB, so you spare yourself the hassles of writing SQLite code.
And, as I mentioned in the comment of another answer to this question, regarding images in Core Data or SQLite, you face a significant performance hit for that. If you're dealing with small images (e.g. thumbnails), it's fine, but if you're dealing with a lot of large images, you really might want to consider storing them in some directory structure under the Documents folder (and then store relative path names in your database). It not architecturally elegant to take the images out of the database and use the Documents folder, but for performance reasons you might want to do precisely that.
No. I would use CoreData for this. CoreData gives you the graphical modelling tools to build an object model and handles all the tedious housekeeping required to persist your object graph to disk.
The photos you would store as conventional files on disk and be modelled by a CoreData object that maintains a reference (URI or file path) to the photo.
I would use CoreData for this, it boils down to an SQLite database, but Apple have added their own wrapper round the SQLite database, making it really simple to use.
There are a number sample apps on the Developer Site as well as numerous Tuts available just by searching the phrase "CoreData example" in google, the link here is ro Raywenderlich which is a good place to start. I think once you go through this blog you'll be using CoreData more and more when you need to store things like this.
With regards to the thumbnail storage I would store those on the device and save the path to the file in the Database.
Yes you can use SQLite for this; in fact it's ideal for holding a family tree given its relational nature.
The photo data can be serialised into a byte stream (NSData *) and stored in a column as a blob.
A database has the huge pro, that you can keep everything stored at one place.
You could (not that I recommend) also use a folder-structure to specify the data like /images/, /words/, /people/ and use the same name for everyone throughout the folders (tim.jpg, tim.txt, tim.dat )
Or use a small database to store everything in different tables all with relation to your "family(_members)" table.
You can also store images in a database, mostly as a blob (or base64 encoded or or or... yuck)
I don't know how well iOS stuff handles those database types of SQLite but you should be better of using a database for that.
You have a number of options here.
If you are storing all of the info within the application itself (ie. the details aren't being fetched from the web somewhere), SQLite (as a CoreData backend) would probably be a good idea. Read up on using CoreData so that you don't end up reinventing the wheel, and so that your implementation provides a smooth scrolling experience that iPhone users expect.
The photos, however, need a different means of storage/retrieval.
A common technique is to implement a 2-level cache system. What this would entail is storing the pictures in individual files, but keeping some of them in-memory after they are retrieved for speed. You could then have a class that looks something like the following:
#interface ThumbnailManager : NSObject
{
id<ImageCache> _imageCache; // You make this.
}
- (UIImage *)imageForFamilyMemberWithName:(NSString *)name;
#end
That's similar to something I would do in your position.
Good luck!
I'm looking for large (preferably 50K+) collection of photos that I could use for testing image recognition software. So preferably photos of objects. I'm fine with album covers, movie posters or anything like that.
Any suggestions?
The ImageNet database (http://www.image-net.org/ - seems to be down at the time I'm writing this, but i think that's temporary) is something you could look into, if it comes back up. It has literally millions of labeled images, seperated into a hierarchy of classes (you don't have to download the complete set).
What about a google search like this?
Another google search let me find this one. Lots of objects there.