That week has flown by, somehow. Well, most of the last two days was gobbled up by the website migration, and there's still a chunk of issues to fix - though I managed to get one or the other already. Like this totally not helpful huge floating image of the basket when you're shopping. Or trying to shop on your mobile phone.

The intention behind this was to have a nice, accessible way to get to the shopping cart or basket or however you want to call it from anywhere inside the shop. So I made this medium-pretty basket image at one point (and there was the idea of replacing it, at some time, with a more medieval-style basket image, but, well, things happened) and inserted it to float at the top of the screen.

Which it does. Unfortunately, with the changed layout of the responsive design, on small screens it blows itself up to maximum size and is not helpful for shopping in peace and quiet anymore... due to overlaying most of the shop. As a customer, that would really annoy me. (Have I mentioned that running my own webshop has made me much more mellow in regard to things not working properly in other webshops? At least partly. Some things annoy me even more now.)

Fortunately, that was rather easy to solve - I just forbid it to display below a certain screen width. Whew.

Other things are not quite as easy; a lot of stuff has changed with the transition to the new major version, and now I have to find old files with my changes again, find out where the new files that have the same info in them are living now, and adapt the new files. There are also issues with changed (and thus broken) links, and the necessity to set up redirects for those. So the list of tasks to do is currently still growing - and I am looking forward to the point where it will shrink again!

So. I hope now that everything was tested sufficiently yesterday and today, and that things will work out without too many issues. Which, potentially, include unwanted design changes in the main site, in the shop, and other glitches there. If you notice anything, please do let me know! 

There will be some layout and design tweaking in the shop in the next days, as the layout I had and preferred was shot by the last larger update of the shop software. Ah, the endless joys of websites and their shenanigans. (To be honest, though, I quite like most of the website work, for a change. I wouldn't want to do it every day, but it is rather nice to be able to tweak things, or take care of some issue myself.)

I've stumbled across Digital Mappa a good long(ish) while ago, and I might or might not have posted about it here on the blog, but it might be time to revisit that. 

Digital Mappa is a tool for digital annotation of manuscripts and images, with the possibility to link multiple different sources, highlight parts of them, and, in short, do a bunch of interesting and potentially helpful things when researching and comparing stuff. Back when I last looked into it, I didn't find anything where you could use the platform without using your own installation. Which I tried to set up, but failed. 

A while ago I received a note about an update to the platform software, and I put on my list to check it out and maybe re-try installing it. These days, I finally got around to looking into it - and I found this article about DM. With, to my utter and great delight, a link to an installation where one can register and then use an already installed, up-and-running version.

Hooray! I've not spent a lot of time with the DM yet, and it certainly takes a little while to get used to, but I have hopes that it will be very, very useful for me and some of my projects - including some collaborative projects as well.

You probably know this phenomenon - you have to do something to some stuff somewhere, and then you start doing it, and then you realise that it would be smart to do something else to something connected somewhere else first. And then... it might just cascade on from there.

Sometimes, that is all well and good, and it's sensible to start at the roots and do things from there up. Sometimes, though, the cascading can be just too much, and it would have been (or would be) better to do the incomplete thing and have it dealt with, instead of having it spiral out of control, attracting more and more work on its merry way.

The true art is probably to know where to stop, as so often in life.

You can probably guess that I'm not writing this out of the blue, too... the current cascading effect that I have to (potentially) deal with is, of course, connected to the photo database migration. (Which is progressing, hooray!) The old programme had flat, non-hierarchical keywords, and the new programme can do hierarchical ones, which is very nice and very welcome. The keywords themselves, though...

I've been adding keywords whenever it seemed necessary, and I tried to process and tag every image as it came into the database. Of course that did not work completely, and there are plenty of un-tagged images around. For the ones that do have keywords (which is most of them), they are not always consistent. That is, obviously, not helpful. So the plan is to clean up keyword issues as I'm sorting them into the new hierarchical structures.

In some cases, that's easy. Birds are animals, just as the tags "horse", "flamingo", or "dog" will go under animals. It's getting more difficult with objects. Fortunately, there's lists of hierarchies for object description and tagging available, developed by museum people and geared towards different focus areas of interest. The Getty Research Institute, for instance, offers a number of vocabularies. (Look for the "Browse ..." line when you are offered a search mask, that gets you to the full set.) For German cataloguing, there is, for instance, the "Objektbezeichnungsdatei" offered by the Digicult-Verbund. Because choosing what to catalogue, and what not, and how to do it, is not at all trivial, there's also literature about that, such as the "Cataloguing Cultural Objects" guideline, a slim and slender 407 pages small, free to download for everybody interested or in need.

One of my main questions for now is how to handle male and female clothing. For my old database, I had a sort-of-makeshift solution, stating "TunicMale" or "TunicFemale". That was not perfect, but it did work. Now I'm not sure what to do for marking things - do I split my clothing term hierarchy into "male garments" and "female garments"? That means that when searching for something unisex, I'll have to search for two terms. On the other hand, I wouldn't have the problem that when looking for, say, only women wearing hoods that also men come up in the search.

Another option would be to mark unisex garments with an (m) or (f) behind the tag proper, giving me the option of having that as a lower hierarchy tier and having the complete term above this. That's probably the better solution, even though it adds layers to the hierarchical tree - which is also something that should not be done too excessively. Ah well. Difficult decisions, but fortunately not ones that need to be taken right away, I can think about it for a bit longer!

There's been a bit more testing, and I think I now have found the best solution for my photo database problem... some more testing will follow, but so far, it does look promising. 

After a bit of mucking around, I now have found out how to import the keywords (proper delimiters are important), and - most important - how and where to import the picture dates so I can sort things by time again. There may have to be some little bit of changing file encodings (there are problems, potentially, with the German Umlaute otherwise), but it does look like I will be able to port everything. Still have to find out where best to shove the comments from the old database, but as I've only ever used those for temporary marking of pics to export, if I lose those, it's no big deal at all.

Just in case you're curious, or are looking for an image database/digital assets management programme yourself, the three in the running were Photo Supreme (the current top dog in my list), iMatch, and Photo Mechanic Plus. They all require a bit of a learning curve.

All three of them also present you, as default, with the "dark" colour scheme. I really don't understand this hype for the dark scheme; it's the same on my phone, about every app wants to go and do the dark thing, and it's hard to convince them (and sometimes impossible) that I want my stuff to be light, light, light. I find it really exhausting to look at a dark screen with light text on it as opposed to a light screen with dark text. I know that some people find the dark background easier on the eyes, but for me, it just doesn't work that well. So it's another point in favour for Supreme that I was able to find a "light colour scheme" pre-selector rather easily, and could switch to a nice grey background that way. (The other two also allow you to change background colours, but it's not as quickly and easily done.)

So. All three are pretty "mighty tools" (which, in geek speak, means "you can do a huge lot of cool things with that programme, but you have to know what you are doing, and learning curves may be steep"). All three will manage large amounts of photos, and all three are mainly geared towards photographers uploading, tagging, culling and sorting their collections and not to weird archaeologists sorting their medieval illustrations with it. With my specific requirements profile (importing data from FotoTime, having weird dates on images, and Umlaute in the keywords and descriptions) all three will need a bit of prodding.

Photo Mechanic does not allow for the import of dates directly, which means that I have a real problem here. iMatch does allow import, and it looked a while like it would win the race, but I keep having issues with actually writing the metadata to the files (that is not done straight away as default, and I've had it write metadata only to find, a few minutes later, that the image still has remaining metadata to be written). So. A bit more testing, probably doing a new larger test import with the parameters and tweaks that I found already, then a bit of working with the candidate... and I'll keep you updated.

I'm still on the hunt for a replacement for my photo database programme. If I had ten Euros for every programme I installed for testing... ah well.

So far, there's three prospective candidates; the first of them is almost out, as there's considerable trouble still to import the metadata from the text file; the second seems to be a bit more promising, but jury's still out on how feasible the import will actually be; and the third one has only just entered the testing phase (import seems possible, but a bit tricky, as it involves several steps and a first quick try did not result in anything helpful).

All three are pay-for-a-license types, which suits me well - one programme was right out of the list as it's a per-month thing, and I'm really not into that. At all.

Well, the testing and installing and trying, that ate a few evenings, while other stuff - like Textile Forum prep - was going on during the daytime. More Forum-related emailing now, and then some writing work to be done. Some day I'll be caught up! (Probably that Some Day is, as the Germans say, Sankt-Nimmerleins-Tag...)

Things going on behind the scenes, here? The search for a new database programme for my images.

As you may guess, I've accumulated a lot of images over the years - photos, drawings, scans from books, videos, you name it. There's a few private and personal ones, but most of them are work-related. They've been handled by a wonderful programme called FotoTime ever since I discovered that, ages ago.

Unfortunately, the company lost their servers in an accident back in March 2021, and has ceased operation due to that. Some of their users lost all their pictures and data (never, never place something important in just one place, file-wise!). Fortunately, for me, that is not the case, but at some point in the future, the programme will probably be too old to work with the current version of Windows... so I thought it might be a smart thing to look into a replacement.

The really nice thing about FotoTime was that you could place your images in a folder structure on your computer that was unrelated to the "album" folder structure in the programme. You could set a date, and keywords, and a copyright notice, and an image description... and all those, of course, I'd like to have transferred to a new programme. Preferably also one that keeps my folder structure.

Some possible databases have already been ruled out, but the one I'm looking at currently is digiKam. It's free and open source, and my test installation seems to at least conserve all the things that were in the old database - and maybe I'll be able to migrate the old database into the new one once I've gotten an idea of how they are structured, and how they work.

If you have a good image database for organising your photos, do let me know what you are using!