Incomplete Image Export?

April 15, 201015 yr

Newbies

Hi all, first post here due to a mystery. I recently exported a bunch of images from a legacy FileMaker Pro database, using FM Pro Migrator. But I'm not convinced I've got everything, because the file sizes don't add up:

The exported database text is 218 Kilobytes
The exported images are 109 Megabytes
The original database file is 1.7 Gigabytes

I seem to have images for every record, but most of them are tiny (7 KB files with dimensions of 320 x 256). Others are larger (e.g. 2.2 MB file with 2592 x 1944 dimensions), but these are a minority.

And there's that huge difference between the size of the database file and the size of the exported data. It's bugging me. The database was originally assembled in older versions of Filemaker running on Mac starting in the late '90s -- the file extension is fp7, and I think they may have converted from Filemaker 6 at some point.

I'd really like to figure out if there are higher-resolution images in the database that I just haven't got yet. They're going to be added to the digital collections at the library where I work, with formal metadata control and such. For archival purposes, we'd much rather have high res photos than the tiny ones I've managed to extract.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

April 15, 201015 yr

To distinguish if there is a high resolution image that is not being exported...

(1) Locate one of the tiny image files.

(2) Locate the corresponding FileMaker record where the image is stored.

(3) Right-click in the field containing the image.

(4) Choose Export Field Contents... from the menu.

(5) Save the image file where you can find it again.

(6) Compare the Tiny image file in step (1) with the image file you saved in step (5).

If the image saved in step (5) is as tiny as the image in step (1), then the image data was exported faithfully and there is no higher resolution image in there.

If the image saved in step (5) is clearly higher resolution, then there was a problem in the automated export. You may need to export field contents manually as above for each record if there are only a few tiny files or create a script that exports field contents for each record automatically if there are far too many to do one at a time manually.