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Published: September 20, 2011

Easy way to merge images and data with flickr

Sharon Grant, Information Systems Director, Information Technology

Balboa Park Online Collaborative has helped seven organizations in Balboa Park upload close to 110,000 images to Flickr. Because of the diversity of information and images that these organizations represent, an easy-to-use way of marrying database records with their images was needed, ensuring that the information is displayed properly within Flickr's Description, Tags, and Title fields. As a result, they've been hard at work on a new image uploader for the museum community that will greatly facilitate online access to collections on Flickr. 

Balboa Park Online Collaborative has helped seven organizations in Balboa Park upload close to 110,000 images to Flickr. Because of the diversity of information and images that these organizations represent, an easy-to-use way of marrying database records with their images was needed, ensuring that the information is displayed properly within Flickr's Description, Tags, and Title fields. As a result, they've been hard at work on a new image uploader for the museum community that will greatly facilitate online access to collections on Flickr. Called Sammu (for Synchronized Automated Media Metadata Uploader), it ingests museum database exports and merges the records with their images and uploads them together.

To see an example of an account uploaded using Sammu, check out the Museum of Photographic Arts' Flickr stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mopa1 Since this account launched in May,

it has enjoyed over 160,000 views, and there's an active community of commenters and discussions about the collection.

They're just about ready to release Sammu to the museum community at large, but we'd like a few dedicated volunteers to check out the software and help us kick the wheels. Sammu does require Mac OS 10.6 or higher to run. Sorry, PC folks.

If you're interested, please drop me a line to psully@bpoc.org.

Project Manager: Online Access and Digital Asset Management

Balboa Park Online Collaborative

 

Sharon Grant
Information Systems Director

Contact

sgrant@fieldmuseum.org

I'm the Information Systems Director. Areas of expertise include Biodiversity Informatics, Data Standards Development, Data Management, Digitization Workflow and Training. Also in my bailiwick is the administration of EMu; the Field Museum's main collections database.