Servers & Resources
By Miller Prosser, January 2014
Servers and resources: the first steps
When a project begins to configure its external resources, there are a few things consider.
In the end, how many images will you have? How will you be uploading them to the server? Do you have FTP or SFTP access?
Server configuration in OCHRE
At the very least, OCHRE will need to know the address of your server, typically expressed as either an http: or https: address. In the case of a secure server, OCHRE will need to be granted access with a user ID and password. These settings are saved in OCHRE at the project level under Preferences > Resources.
Don't complicate your server organization, keep it simple
If you are going to be limited to tiffs and jpegs, then you might not have too much to worry about. Projects that have a variety of image types (like jpg, PTM, GIS) have to be more careful. Please consult closely with the OCHRE Data Service (ODS) if your project will include images of different types.
If you are going to have fewer than 5,000 images, then we recommend creating two directories, one called Images and one called Previews. (If you are going to have more than this—like 100,000—then you should break up the Images directory into sub-directories.) The only reason for creating a system of sub-directories on your server is to limit the total number of images in any given directory. We recommend against thinking of the server as a means of organizing images into content groups. OCHRE will do this for you. A server tends to become disorganized quickly if various directories are created. The Images directory will store all of your hi-res images, whether those are jpegs or tiffs. The Previews directory will store smaller versions of all these images, one for one.
Create thumbnail previews
We typically advise that people create a preview/thumbnail version of every image. 400px is usually a decent size. Make sure all your files are named how you want them to be named. Then use Photoshop, or something similar, to run through all your hi-res images as a batch and save them as previews at 400px width, with the suffix “_thumbnail.” This allows the user to load up a series of images quickly and then choose which one(s) to download at a higher resolution. So, your server should have at least those two directories.
Naming for linking
Don’t use spaces, dots, or other special characters in your file names. If you need to do bulk renaming, consider the free software called Advanced Renamer. When naming your images, keep this in mind: if the image names are the same as your text/object names in OCHRE, then we can automatically link the images to the texts/objects when we import the images. So, if you had an image of text TC 1 3, I would name the image TC_1_3-obverse.jpg, or something similar. The point being, the more consistently the images are named, the better chance we have of auto-linking to a text/object. Otherwise, you’ll have to work through the image resources and link them to texts manually. That’s not a problem, just a bit more time consuming.
As an example of the naming procedure for previews, the sample file in OARE doesn’t currently have a preview, but if it did, it would be called Testing_thumbnail.jpg.
The import and creation of the resources in OCHRE is a separate step, of course. There are some import tools to help in this process. We’ll discuss these tools in another article.
NOTE: spaces in a directory name may prevent OCHRE from successfully uploading images or creating thumbnails due to restrictions in FTP functionality. Use underscores in directory names, e.g. "1986_Photographs" instead of "1986 Photographs."