SPNCH 2013 - Image Archiving Principles and Practice at The New York Botanical Garden

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METRO - Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom Workshop

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NYBG Herbarium Image Editing Workflow

Click below to view the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium Image Editing Guidelines - documentation of our post-capture image processing workflow using Adobe Lightroom.

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The preview in Google Docs is low resolution. Once in Google Docs, click the Download Original button to save a more legible copy.

Adobe Lightroom - Corrupt Thumbnails

I just got a new Dell Optiplex 990 computer with an Intel Core i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40 GHz with 8.00 GB of RAM and 64-bit Windows 7 OS for image processing. It's fast.

I just processed 2 processed 2,297 .DNG files and exported them as Jpegs. Unfortunately, when I look at the thumbnails in Windows, this is how they look:

Click images to enlarge

I thought the files were corrupt and tried exporting them again - same result. When I opened the images the files seemed fine, but I didn't want to run the risk of corrupt thumbnails. Fortunately a post on SevenForums described the same phenomenon. Here is the solution:

Open Disk Cleanup (I just click on the Start Menu and type Disk Cleanup in the Search box).

Select the drive where you keep your thumbnails and press the OK button.

Check Thumbnails on the list of stuff to clean up (you may want to un-check all the other options) and press the OK button. This will delete all your thumbnails. When you reopen the folder your thumbnails will be fixed (they were never broken, but in the interest of speed, they were never drawn right in the first place).

"Fixed"

I hope this helps.

Global Plants Initiative - JSTOR

As part of the Global Plants Initiative, The New York Botanical Garden Herbarium is submitting high resolution scans of type specimens to JSTOR.


These scans are made with Epson 10000 scanners and create images that are about 200MB a piece. In addition to sending these images to Jstor, we are keeping copies of them ourselves. We currently have about 80,000 images stored on our servers. That takes up about 15 TB of space.

I am considering converting these TIFF images to DNG. I estimate that it would allow me to recover about 7.5 TB of server space. I have to look to see if others have converted TIFFs to DNG to see if this is a wise course.

 (Wise or not, I will probably do it because I need the space and the TIFFs are already being stored by Jstor)

Adobe Lightroom 2.7 Error - Unable to Export

I am in the final stages of the first phase of restructuring the Herbarium's digital image archive. Of course, this is when I hit a snag. I am sorting through a 2 terabyte mirror of the first archive structure, built who knows when. It contains TIFFs, NEFs, CRWs, and Kodak DCS 660 TIFF RAWs. There were 161,658 files hidden in a very opaque folder structure consisting of 6,201 folders.

Using Adobe Lightroom, I sorted the files into collections according to type: TIFF, RAW, and KodakRAW (the Kodak TIFF RAWs were tricky, because they show up as TIFF files, so I segregated these from the RAW files).

Out of the 60,396 TIFF files, I made a collection of 21,142 TIFFs for which there were no corresponding RAW files and exported them to an external hard drive. These will be returned to the archive, along with the RAW files. The remaining 45,564 TIFF files will be backed up on to tape and deleted from our servers.

I successfully converted the Kodak TIFF RAW files into DNG.

Now, I just have to move the RAW files. I could do this using a Windows search and just moving them on the sevrer, but I want to unify the file formats, so I figured I would export them from Lightroom as DNG. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, I encountered the following error:

Unable to Export

An internal error occurred: XMP parse threw an unknown exception

Now what?

"But there are thousands of TIFFs on that server!" - (Deleted)

Did you feel that? I just deleted 119,570 TIFF files off of one of our archive servers.

5.1 TB just vanished.



(Don't worry -they have been moved offline onto tape)

DNG Archive

Today I am taking the first step towards tidying up the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium image archive.

I have made the leap. I will no longer be producing TIFF Production Master files. I will only be archiving DNG Archive Master files.

Now the real work begins, sorting through all the TIFF files and moving them offline.

Digitization Special Interests Group Meeting - METRO.org

Digitization Special Interests Group

Last week I attended Metro's Digitization Special Interests Group meeting. The discussion panel included  John Mignault from The New York Botanical Garden, Andrea Buchner from the Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory at the Center for Jewish History, and Jennifer Vinopal from New York University.

It was a very informative meeting and there are some take away thoughts posted on Metro's tech blog.

Jennifer Vinopal mentioned that at NYU they make a distinction between archive and preservation and I find the distinction to be helpful. The archive guarantees bits. You put bits in, you get the same bits out in the same bit order. There is no guarantee of the viability of the file format. Preservation, she said, is an institutional commitment that requires human vigilance. 

I like that. It makes me feel brave.