Image Management for a Multi-Instrument, Multi-Platform Teaching Facility and Implications for Outreach Programs

Extract

In the digital age, the management of images can be very time consuming when there are several digital image acquisition systems involved. For simplicity in this article, databases have been categorized as active or passive. Active databases are those where the categorization of the image is done during the image acquisition. Passive databases by this definition use saved images that are then categorized after image acquisition. The databases can be further separated based on whether they are multi-platform where they usually use a browser of some sort or Java script, or are specific to a certain platform such that no browser is involved. Some databases allow user defined fields, and some do not. Many of the image database software packages were made for categorizing images after they were collected i.e. passive, and developed for photography, catalogues, newspapers, etc. which do not necessarily cater to the needs in microscopy.