Import Images "Match Records"

[ewillia]

Hi,

I'm trying to import a folder with several thousand images, and assign the images to specific records already in my DB. I have the files all as "ID#.tif", where the ID# is what I want to match by in filemaker.

Unfortunately, since there is the ".tif" at the end, I cannot "match records by name" because FM doesn't separate the extension from the filename. Is a good work-around for this? There are too many images to load them in by hand. I tried removing the ".tif" from the filename, but then FM no longer recognizes the filetype as readable (no surprise).

I'm looking at the search results for people with similar problems—I would like to store my images in the container rather than as references. (They're rather small—40kb chemical structures.)

Alternately, I could just append ".tif" to the end of all my ID#s (they're not the index IDs, so it's OK) and then remove the ".tif" after import, but I cannot figure out a way to do that either.

Thanks!

Edited October 6, 2009 by Guest

[ewillia]

Ok well, I managed to figure it out in a perhaps stupid way, but I couldn't find any other help for doing what I wanted:

I exported the data to Excel, copied the "ID#" column and added a "ID#.tif" column. I then re-imported those two columns in, added a variable for "IDTif", put the "ID#.tif" data in that vector, then imported the images matching the filename to "ID#.tif". It's completely inelegant, and I hope there's a better way to do this.

(I'm new to FM; I've been using SQL/python/php for years. Kind of ironic how difficult I find this simple task to be...)

[Fenton]

Actually, it is pretty easy. Create a calculation field, with Text result.

your id field & ".tif"

[ewillia]

Ah... thanks, much better than re-importing.

Is there a way to do it straight off from the import, though? (I.e. can I change the way 'match' works, or does it have to be perfect correspondence?)