Yes, I did this first with the Yale University Art Gallery and more recently with the Yale Center for British Art. However, both collections are relatively small compared to yours.

 

At the Art Gallery and initially at the YCBA, I grouped the images by decades, continuing to keep the screen and thumbnail images separate.

 

At that time, our image names included the accession# making it relatively easy to assign an image to a decade.

 

Recently at the YCBA we changed the image naming convention to include the ObjectID and other data and dropped the accession#, so I set up another set of folders to accommodate the new naming convention.

 

All of the folders now in use are listed in the attached pdf.

 

The hard part is moving images and pointing the TMS record to the new location. I used a combination of SQL code and a little manual work to move some images, but most of the images at both museums remain in the original large screen and 192x192 folders.

 

Moving the images are a low priority item right now, but it wouldn’t be difficult to have someone right a program to move the image and update the TMS image record with the new path.

 

I hope this helps,   David

 

 

 

David Parsell

Systems Manager

Yale Center for British Art

1080 Chapel Street

PO Box 208280

New Haven, CT  06520-8280

 

203 432-9603

203 432-9414 f

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From: The Museum System (TMS) Users [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Garton, Susan
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 11:52 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Image subfolders

 

Does anyone out there have experience with breaking an existing image folder into subfolders/paths? How daunting of a task is this?

 

Thanks to Jeri Moxley’s brief survey about Media module standards back in 2005, there was some discussion of the use of subfolders. Do most museums use subfolders now, and how are they broken down? I’m most interested in knowing how those with 10s of 1000s of *object* images are breaking those down.

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Sue

 

Susan Garton

Data Administrator

Center for Electronic Research and Outreach Services

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Phone: (202) 633-8554 / Fax: (202) 633-8254

E-mail: [log in to unmask]