Image Data

Heritage Images

There are two aspects to heritage images from the Wiki perspective, the first is images held in this wiki, and the second and more significant is references to images that have been published. Each of these are important but quite different and it is only recently that a structured way storing heritage images has been developed. This is in direct response to various interest groups sharing heritage photos on Facebook, where there is no structure at all. To try and find an image that you know has been viewed there can be nigh impossible. The original focus of this wiki was to create a means of indexing references to published images, with a preliminary process developed, but there is still a lot of work to do in that area.

Stored Heritage Images

I have developed a process for managing images to be saved (uploaded) to the wiki. The uploading of an image file is very easy, the challenge is to know what the image has been named. For this reason I have opted for a random name (i.e. a number) and rely on a database entry to record details about the image in a structured way. While this is still early days, the database table and data entry forms have been created and are able to be used. The system used to auto generate the image number needs to be rethought due to the lag between creating the record, and the database being updated. This usually means the user is ready to process a second image when the database does not know that the previous image is loaded yet, so an incorrect number is generated. There will be a tidy solution for this I have not discovered yet.

All images stored or used by the wiki are all stored in the image 'namespace'. In order to be able to separate Heritage images from all other sorts of images e.g. book covers and icons used in the wiki etc., Heritage Images are also grouped in their own 'category'. This allows them to be searched easily . Every wiki page has a Photo Gallery tab at the top. The aim is to be able to write a query that will enable the display of heritage photos relevant to that particular page. The photo gallery tab on this page would then provide access to all the heritage photos.

Image references

One of the primary aims of this wiki is to be able to generate references to things that are visible in a image. This has the proviso that a copy of the image would not need to be held in the wiki, you just need a reference to which publication(s) it has appeared in.

The fundamentals of this have been worked out but a number of issues still need to be worked on. One such detail is how to reference the images, and the simplest might be to have a two stage system, starting with a consecutive number for images in each book, then have a process defined for matching up images to a master list.