fmp17 Filemaker interacting with Photo Software

[Answers]

I have a customer that has 3TB of photos in the program Picasa. They use it to edit images and then put some in Filemaker. Currently the images are on a NAS. The problem is it seems to be getting slower and slower. Picasa is discounted so I'm looking for a replacement that can handle the large amount of images they take on the job site and interact with Filemaker, seamlessly. they run on a windows platform but would like to perhaps introduce iPads to the mix in the future.

Not sure if this is the right place to post this question but I thought I'd give it a go.

Any guidance on the matter would be greatly appreciated. 

Edited November 14, 2018 by Answers

[OlgerDiekstra]

What is getting slow? FileMaker? Picasa? Editing? NAS?

There are plenty of apps out there (ie Photoshop, The Gimp, Affinity Photo, ...) that can do all the editing you want. But without knowing what sort of editing is done (light edit I would assume considering Picasa was good enough), it's hard to make a recommendation.

How would the editing software need to interact with FileMaker? Or are they just taking photos, cropping them and uploading some into FileMaker? That could easily be done using iPads, FileMaker can do that natively and store images in containers straight from the camera.

For just cropping and other light edits, Irfanview, XNView, Paint.net might be suitable.

 

[Answers]

Thank you for replying to my topic. I got sidetracked with other issues. So whats getting slow is Picasa and the NAS. So we are looking for a central location for the photos, and that it's easy enough to edit (annotations, light edits)

And correct they are basically taking the edited photos to upload some into FileMaker. As simple a a drag and drop. The customer does fireplaces and chimneys so the images are used to guide the technicians and also for before and after history. 

On 11/15/2018 at 3:48 AM, OlgerDiekstra said:

What is getting slow? FileMaker? Picasa? Editing? NAS?

There are plenty of apps out there (ie Photoshop, The Gimp, Affinity Photo, ...) that can do all the editing you want. But without knowing what sort of editing is done (light edit I would assume considering Picasa was good enough), it's hard to make a recommendation.

How would the editing software need to interact with FileMaker? Or are they just taking photos, cropping them and uploading some into FileMaker? That could easily be done using iPads, FileMaker can do that natively and store images in containers straight from the camera.

For just cropping and other light edits, Irfanview, XNView, Paint.net might be suitable.

 

 

[OlgerDiekstra]

For storage I would recommend a NAS vendor that has reasonable presence in your region. If available, Synology and Qnap are good choices. I have no experience with Qnap, but they use the same approach as Synology. With Synology, and similar NAS vendors, you have a ton of options and apps you can run on the NAS. I have a pair of Synology NAS's here (2 NAS's with each 55TB and each NAS 2 shelves of 22 disks). We collect some 15TB annually in photos (we're a photography company). When a customer purchases images, those images are relocated in a separate folder on the NAS which is backed up to the other NAS, and from there backed up to an AWS S3 bucket for off-site backup. All this is automated and requires only occasional checks to ensure everything is working. Frees my time up for other things, such as FileMaker development.

We also use offshore editors for some of our editing and images that need to be edited are copied to a separate folder on the NAS, which is linked to a dropbox account to which the offshore editors have access. Our internal editors can manage that all themselves. Images are returned the same way which creates a nice workflow that I don't have to be part of.

The above is just to illustrate how a good NAS can be beneficial to business workflows.

This is what the interface of a Synology NAS looks like. It's just like working on a desktop.

Synology's, Qnap's and the like come in various sizes, from single disk units to multi shelf rack units. If your customer decides to go with multiple physical NAS's then make sure you get different disk vendors in each NAS, ie WD in one and Hitachi in another (personally I stay clear of Seagate, we had a very bad experience with them).

These NAS's generally also come with multiple GB or 10GB ports so plenty of network throughput. Naturally, you also need good switching gear in order to get good performance to the desktop.

Our editors load up to 15 images (each 10-15MB) at a time into Photoshop from the NAS, which takes about a minute or so to load. That's acceptable for us. Depending on the size images you customer has, that is likely to be quicker.

For annotating/small edits, Paint.net is free and quite capable. If the work is really just cropping and annotating images, have a look at Greenshot, it's a screen capture  software but comes with an editor that allows you to do basic edits very easily.

As for images for before and after history, that's something that can easily be built in FM Go.

Hope that helps!

Edited November 28, 2018 by OlgerDiekstra