Camera Electronics Gurus I need help

Post by **alk1174** » Mon Mar 23, 2009 9:59 am

Does anyone know of a camera that will allow you to input a title with the picture as you take it? Perhaps a decent camera phone with a qwerty keyboard? We are working on a project here at work and need to be able to title pictures on the fly and do it fairly quickly. I figured some one here may be more up to date on electronincs than I am.
In my initial searching all I can find are camera phones that may be the route we go but might not be the best. HTey probably will not have enough battery life to do what we need.

Post by **Arya Ebrahimi** » Mon Mar 23, 2009 10:32 am

Low-tech way of doing it is to pick up a small white board at Office Depot, write what it is you're taking a picture of and then just make sure it's in the picture. That's how we do it here on the job site from time to time.

Post by **alk1174** » Mon Mar 23, 2009 11:21 am

We have done that also and it works fine but we are anticipating 2 to 6 thousand pictures per project that we need to be able to find again later on a moments notice.

Post by **Arya Ebrahimi** » Mon Mar 23, 2009 1:00 pm

Damn, that's a lot of pics!

Good luck. If you find something, let me know, we could use the same.

Post by **MtnToys** » Mon Mar 23, 2009 1:52 pm

Are you trying to mark the location of the pictures?
You can set the time stamp on your camera to the exact time of your GPS. There are some free programs online thatâ€™ll sync them up putting a location to all the pictures.

Post by **alk1174** » Mon Mar 23, 2009 2:07 pm

The gps is a possible option but we do not know if it is mandatory. We did find a panasonic camera with a "baby" function. Its designed to put a name or age with the pictures of you baby but will put in any text or number combo and its about 250$. There is also a Ricoh 500 es with built in GPS and picture naming function its around a grand but its designed for outdoor use. We are still researching got to come up with a solution soon I can let you know what we decide on.

Post by **alk1174** » Mon Mar 23, 2009 7:34 pm

Arya Ebrahimi wrote:Damn, that's a lot of pics!

My estimates are showing over 45000 pictures needed for this project.

Post by **yotacowboy** » Mon Mar 23, 2009 9:51 pm

alk1174 wrote:
Arya Ebrahimi wrote:Damn, that's a lot of pics!
My estimates are showing over 45000 pictures needed for this project.

From the software end of things you're likely gonna want to use Photoshop because it comes with another program called Bridge. If you're using a decent digital SLR bodied camera (prolly around $500-700), you can set all sorts of meta tags in the RAW file - kind of like the meta data on an HTML page. You can even tell the camera that when a certain media card is in the camera, it tags each file with specific meta data. For example, if you're shooting one job site, you plug in a certain card (that you've assigned certain descriptors or naming conventions or whatever prior to shooting) and shoot away. While the photo's are still in the camera you could pretty easily tag specific files with specific meta data, like selecting a tag from a list. Once you get back to the office, you can batch process the whole downloading operation (and any post-shoot work) based on any of the meta data. Regular old JPEG's or TIFF's don't allow nearly as much data (that's not actually part of the photo) to be embedded into the file. The other benefit to working in RAW is that the original RAW data can never really be changed, you can only add operations/processes to the original file contents. Good if there's ever any legal reason for a file to NOT get messed with.

In a program like Adobe Bridge (or something else like Apple's Aperture, as well as several others) you can sort all the photos (45000 is definitely manageable) very quickly and efficiently all based on the meta data in the file. You can perform multi-tiered searches, and so on. I believe bridge and aperture both allow a decent amount of custom scripting to generate batch commands, too, tho i'm not sure what the coding language is...

Trying to use Win-doze media stuff for this with a bunch of JPEG's would be like trying to weld 4"-thick cast iron to 6" tool-steel plate with a hair dryer.

Post by **alk1174** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 7:43 am

Thanks Clay. There is some good info in there. We are going to pick up a Ricoh 500 se today to try out for a few days.

Post by **yotacowboy** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 10:10 am

That ricoh looks like it'd be a good solution. there's a limit to how much data you can add to the exif headers, but depending on what you need, it could work. I'd still recommend a photo library program (like adobe Bridge) in addition to arcmap or arcgis or landcad or something - tho i'm not sure to what extent the gps/gis/cad will play nicely with any of the library programs - i'd guess that there's plug-in or some single software solution since somebody somewhere has prolly needed exactly the same stuff you need. managing 100,000 photos is not as hard as it would seem if you've got good software.

*also, the way to search for some of the most customizable and powerful software is to look at Content Management System (CMS) providers. Expensive, but very, very cool - especially if your implementation must last over many years.