Collecting A Picture Vault

By Martin Taylor (SW fan and techno-geek)

What is the most useful tool in your workshop or in your toolbox?  That bright yellow, 18 volt, cordless, hammer drill is really sexy and that combination CNC lathe and milling machine is an prop builder's wet dream but neither are half as useful as a picture vault.

"What the hell is a picture vault?" I hear you ask.  When you want to build a prop there is nothing more useful than canonical reference pictures of the prop you want to make.  Professional stage and screen property masters are notorious pack rats.  It's their business and nature to be this way.  It goes beyond hoarding garage sale junk in their storage rooms and shops.  It is a state of mind.  Whenever the property master sees something interesting in a store, or a movie, or on the web he files that information away for future use.

But he doesn't only rely on his memory.  In the past prop builders kept files or scrapbooks of pictures of everything and anything that was of interest, or might be useful some day.  The scope of these picture catalogues could be vast; one prop master I read about attempted to create a "picture morgue" of everything on earth.  He bought incomplete, cheap encyclopedias from junk stores, and scrounged read magazines from recycling.  He spent days cutting out and filing pictures.  His collection ended up being vast, taking up two full-sized filing cabinets and yet he was often disappointed by its thorough and completeness.

He attempted to catalogue the world and set himself up to fail.  The amateur prop builder's version of the picture reference is much more manageable.  To begin with, your scope is likely to be much more concentrated; you're likely to be interested in a genre or period of movies, or perhaps a specific show, title or style of prop.  Secondly, we now have technology on our side; I don't fool around with scissors and glue because my PC is my scrapbook.

Technology

If you're reading this then you probably already have a PC which you can use to store your picture vault.  Perhaps you even already store pictures on your hard drive but with a little organization and knowledge you can make that collection so much more useful.  So what do you need? 

Storage

You need somewhere to store your picture collection.  Part of a hard drive is the most common place but you could use external media like zip disks or CDRW successfully too.  Personally, I use a hard disk and back up using a CD burner.  There's no longer any need to be stingy about disk space.  Hard disks are incredibly cheap; I just bought a highly reviewed, 40 gig hard drive for less than $130 (April-2001).

Picture Management Program

A bunch of image files on your hard drive is not very useful in themselves.  A image management program will help you organize, catalogue and usefully search and browse your collection.  There are several powerful programs out there to help you with all these tasks and don't worry, their costs range from 'reasonable' to 'free'!  The two I most recommend are ThumbsPlus by Cerious Software and ACDSee from ACD systems.  Both these programs allow you to organize, browse and search multimedia files.  They both store thumbnails in a database, have image enhancement tools built in, and have free trials for you to evaluate their software.  ACDSee even had a "sponsor mode" that meant you never had to pay for the software as long as you endured an advertising banner within the program and that you connected to their website regularly but I am not sure if that offer is still valid.

There are many other alternatives out there, so many that it is hard to keep track.  If you're interested visit some of the digital camera forums and ask what people use and recommend as these are the people these programs are targeting as their primary users.

Web connection

Again, if you're reading this you already have this.  The web is your richest source to stock your picture vault.

Nice to haves

Scanners and digicams - the web needn't be your only source of pictures.  You may wish to scan images from books or photographs you already have.  You may want to take your own pictures when you visit an exhibition or a fellow builder's collection.  Both scanners and cameras are huge subjects in their own rights with many sites dedicated to their purchase and use.

Video Capture Cards and DVD drives - another source of images is direct from the movie you're interested in.  With a capture card for video, or a DVD drive installed in you PC you can grab your own stills directly from the source. 

CDR and Zip Drives - Once you've invested all that time and energy in assembling your picture vault wouldn't you hate to lose it?  Wouldn't you hate to lose any data on you machine for that matter? It's often said, but rarely executed, backup your machine.  With today's high capacity hard drives floppies just don't cut it.  Invest in a zip drive, or a CD burner which is my preference, and back that sucker up at least every month.  Once you make it a habit you'll be able to sleep better.

How to use?

I know most of you probably save pictures to your hard drive when you encounter them if they interest you.  For those of you who don't know, when you see a picture on the web that you want to save, right click on the picture. "Save the picture as" and choose the location on your local drive where you want to save the image.  In most cases you will now have a .jpeg, .gif or .bmp file on your hard drive.  There are a couple of instances where you may need to be a little more persistent:

1. Some image hosting services present all images with the same file name.  This is a result of the technology they utilize.  Photopoint, for example, when you click to save a file will always offer you the name "view.jpg".  Simply change the "view" element of the name to something unique and useful e.g. "lukeLightsaber1.jpg".
    

2. Some site developers put security in your way to try to protect their images.  This kind of technology ranges from disabling the right click key to hiding the source of the picture from you.  Usually these protection measures are more of a deterrent than real security.  If you can see an image in your browser it has been downloaded to your PC.  Browsers store elements of pages they think might be useful again in a cache.  This helps in speeding up page downloads in that, if the page, or one like it, are visited again the browser doesn't have to downloaded from the web all elements of the page's content again but can visit its own internal cache.  What is a cache?  A cache is simple a part of your hard disk set aside to save these files.  Where is it?  By looking at the preferences of your browser you can find the directory name of your cache.  How do I use it?  Using your image management software navigate to the browser cache immediately after encountering a picture you want to keep.  In the cache order files by creation date and you should see the picture you want somewhere near the top of the list.  Copy the picture and put it into the the directory you are using for your picture vault.

Organization of the vault

For the picture vault to be useful you have to be a little anal about its structure and maintenance. 

Physical Structure: Within your hard drive's directory you must create an area where you are going to store your pictures.  Don't bury this directory too deep in your directory structure; I like to keep it at the top level but, if you're running Win 2000 etc. you might like to make it a sub-directory of "My Pictures".  I name this directory "Picture Vault" so it is obvious what it is.  Don't store anything in this directory except pictures and sub-directories.  Within this directory you should create sub-directories which can be used to subcategorize your pictures physically.  How you do this is up to you but I have a directory for each movie that I'm interested in.  I try to have no more than 50 pictures in each directory as more than this is cumbersome.   For example "Star Wars" is broken down into many sub-directories including "Lightsabers".  This is further broken down into "OB1 ANH", "OB1 Ep1", "Maul" etc.  I have a directory at the main level for the movie "5th Element", however, this contains less than 50 pictures at the moment so it does not contain sub-directories.  Do you get the idea?  It's work spending a little time planning this on paper before you start implementing your structure on your PC; name the directories as intuitively as possible .  Once the directory structure is in place whenever you save a new picture save it immediately into the appropriate directory and you will soon have a useful collection.

Logical Structure: From within your image management program you will be able to browse the physical structure you created.  The way most of the programs work is that one frame will show you your physical position in the directory structure, another will show you thumbnails of the images in the current directory, and further frames will show you "meta-data" about the currently selected image.  Your physical structure should give you a good idea where to find a certain image but the meta-data can make these images even more useful.

So what is meta-data?  There are two kinds of meta-data associated with an image; meta-data stored in the actual image file and meta-data stored by your image management program.  The information stored in the image is the kind of thing you see when you view the properties of a picture you took with your digital camera; things like the model of camera you used and the date and time you took the picture.  You can use programs to change this information actually in the files but the problem is that a lot of image editing software will remove this information when you manipulate a file.  For example, I use Photoshop.  When I manipulate one of my digital photos I lose all the information about the date and time I took the picture and it gets replaced with the fact that the file was "written by Adobe Photoshop 5.2".  Not very useful.

The second kind of meta-data is the information that you can associate with a picture in your image management software.  The information you can add here is really only limited by your imagination and anality.  You can add descriptions (is the picture a copy or an original, who made it etc.), a URL to source, and, most powerfully, keywords.  If you add keywords to your pictures you could search on "Luke" within your image management program and the search could return all pictures of his Lightsabers from all movies, plus his blaster, character pictures etc.  The only problem with this information is it only available through your particular image management software on you machine.  This is because these programs usually store everything in a database except that actual picture itself.  This includes the thumbnail and all this useful meta-data.  So, before you invest time entering lots of keywords you must be sure that you have selected the right program for your needs.  I try to do everything to do with my pictures through ACDSee, that way I am always exploiting the power of the program.

Ethics and Etiquette

This is a touchy issue.  I've already explained how some people and organizations try to protect their images so that you can't easily save them to your hard drive.  I've also explained how to get around this so the question is why do they try to protect their pictures and how should you behave?  In general people try to protect their images because they have sole rights to them and they don't want to find pictures that they have taken the time and, sometimes, expense to create on someone else's website or in someone's eBay auction.  NEVER USE SOMEONE'S PICTURES WITHOUT THEIR PERMISSION.  Do not steal images and put them on your site or in your auction without first making sure you have permission to do so.  It doesn't matter that you don't have a digital camera and your item looks just like the one in the picture you borrowed, or that the picture is on a public website so you just thought you'd put it on yours too.  It doesn't matter that you altered the picture and cropped out, or cloned out the original owner's watermark.  The picture is not your property.

Why then have I explained how to save and store images in a picture vault?  The picture vault is nothing more than an electronic scrap book.  As long as there have been magazines and newspapers people have cut out articles and pictures that interest them and pasted them into scrap books to store them and to view them at their convenience.  They never have owned the rights to those articles and pictures and could not use them verbatim in a book that they wrote but they might use them as reference material when writing that book.  That's what the picture vault is; a convenient way to store and access reference material. 

If you create a picture vault you have certain responsibilities to protect your sources.  This includes not publishing the pictures yourself but also deterring others from doing so.  To this end I suggest that you do not exchange pictures that you do not own with others unless the picture's source and rights are made clear and you know the person well enough to determine that they will abide by those conditions.  It is better to point someone to the source of the picture than to send them the actual image.

To avoid confusion make sure that you keep pictures that you own separate from those in the picture vault.  It doesn't matter if you do this via a physical or logical method but you never want to find yourself in the position that you have used an image because you had thought that it was yours.  Ignorance is no defense.  Also, however comprehensive or useful your picture vault becomes, you can never use it in part or whole as part of a trade or sale.  Do not burn CDs of your files and exchange them.  This piracy.  The picture vault should be used only for personal and altruistic ends.