Packing pictures

DALLAS -- Two respected photo editors demonstrated the systems they've developed in-house to manage digital images from "idea to archive" at Digital '97 here April 2-5.

Scott Henry, the photo editor of the Marin Independent Journal in suburban San Francisco, showed a group of three databases he has built that allow him to handle photo assignments, captions and image archives.

The photo assignment and caption databases are built in Claris Corp.'s FileMaker Pro database.

"You're moving into a digital era," Henry said, "and you want people to have access to everything through a network or a dial-up."

In the assignment database, editors enter in a lot of information, including the subject's name, occupation, phone number, race (the IJ's parent, Gannett Co. Inc., requires reports on the diversity of the people pictured in its newspapers) and, of course, the photographer's name, the date and time the photo is to be taken, and the assignment itself.

"When the photographer returns," said Henry, "the flip side of the [paper] assignment form is a negative filing form."

After the photographer has scanned the pictures, the caption database is opened (with much information pre-filled from the assignment database) and the photographer writes the caption in a window that has a spellchecker.

Henry said that a "little AppleScript" -- the macro programming language of Macintosh -- takes all the information from the caption database and puts it into the NAA/IPTC header record of the picture.

Pictures are then stored in a Cumulus database from Canto Software of San Francisco.

On the other coast, at Long Island's Newsday, Dan Neville also uses Cumulus as a short-term database. Staff photos reside in the Cumulus database for 20 days, while wire service photos are kept for five days. The paper's permanent archive is MediaSphere, from Cascade Systems Inc. of Andover, Mass.

"The reason we have the Cumulus database," Neville said, "is in case the MediaSphere database goes down."

Neville uses Userland Software Inc.'s Frontier scripting environment to automate moving his pictures from one system to another.

"Scripting is nuts," Neville said. "The only two I've ever learned are Frontier and AppleScript, and I've found Frontier more powerful."

Frontier supports not only its own scripting language, but also AppleScript as well. AppleScripts can be placed into Frontier, where they run normally.

The former photographer, who is now in the paper's editorial systems department, emphasizes that though scripting is difficult, the easiest way to learn it is to use the record function of AppleScript.

"I've learned 90 percent of what I know through recording," he said. "You just record AppleScript and then cut-and-paste it into Frontier."

-- dmc

See also Skeptics -- and attendees -- few and far between at Digital '97

A web special from THE COLE PAPERS, May 1997, Copyright (c) 1997, All Rights Reserved.