Search Me!

The real power of ResourceSpace is its search capabilities, starting with a MySQL-backed search engine that understands photo metadata. The underpowered searching of most desktop photo managers offers little more than timestamps, one-to-five "star" ratings, and an unkempt array of tags that capture neither meaning nor context.

In contrast, ResourceSpace makes user-friendly searching its priority. The basic search box is available on every screen, and the advanced search form lets you search on every field in the database, by field (Figure 5). That means you can search for photos of your uncle Rico without all of your photos from Puerto Rico clogging up the results – even if your uncle Rico lives in San Juan.

ResourceSpace allows you to sort your search results in a variety of ways, including by date, by number of downloads, and by color, but it also keeps track of the click-through rate of every image that turns up in search results, so that it can continually adjust the "relevance" sorting order. "Relevance" thus learns which images are most likely to be selected based on the search terms and can rank them at the top of your search results.

ResourceSpace builds on its underlying search power with the collections framework. As you search or browse images, a filmstrip-like frame remains open at the bottom of the window that tracks your current collection. By default, you have one named "My Collections" (Figure 6), but you can add as many as you want. When you find an image that you are interested in, just click on the filmstrip icon to add it to the current collection. Also, you can add saved searches to a collection to aid in finding images in the future.

Each collection is persistent; ResourceSpace will not delete it unless you ask it to. The collections can serve as photo albums, workspaces for ongoing projects, or galleries. On a multi-user system, you can share collections with team members with read/write or read-only permissions, and you can make them entirely public. Additionally, collections can have keyword metadata to be indexed by ResourceSpace's search engine, and you can tag all items in a collection as related, so they will be accessible in a related images search. Finally, for offline usage, ResourceSpace can automatically generate proof sheets of collections in almost any layout and paper-size combination.

Customization

As nice as ResourceSpace is, it is even nicer that the entire system is easily customized. As free software, of course, all of the source code is available, and many changes are easy to make with help from the official documentation [4]. Additionally, those who don't want to dig into the PHP themselves will find many options available from the administration interface of ResourceSpace itself.

The Manage Content module (accessible to administrators from Team Center) allows you to customize virtually all of the display text used throughout the interface. The Manage Related Keywords module lets you relate keywords to one another that the database might not otherwise connect. The Manage Field Options module lets you alter or extend the options presented for file metadata, such as adding or removing countries, changing the built-in rating scale from1-5 to 1-10, or changing the image source options (Figure 7).

For example, the default Source field has just three alternatives: digital photo, scanned negative, and scanned print. To add a new category for computer-generated images, click Edit, type Computer Generated in the Add keyword box, and click the Create button. From the same page, you can also edit the existing fields, and any changes you make will be applied automatically to all matching resources.

Administrators can make more substantial changes to the metadata fields by going to the System Setup page. From there, you can mark fields as required to force users to fill them in when uploading files, select which fields are enabled for simple and advanced searches, and add custom help text.

Also, you can add new fields entirely. Out of the box, ResourceSpace only supports a subset of the defined Exif and IPTC metadata fields. To add a new field, click on the New Field link under the resource type you want to edit and give the new field a name. Immediately, it will appear in the list of available fields, and you can edit it like any other.

For example, ResourceSpace includes a Country field by default, but not a City field. To add a City field, visit System Setup, navigate to the Photo resource type, click on New Field, name it City, and click Save. Now edit the options for the City field that ResourceSpace will present to users – making it a free text entry box or a drop-down list of options. Also, you can tell ResourceSpace to map any incoming IPTC headers to the new field by filling out the Iptc equiv option. According to ResourceSpace documentation, the official IPTC header for City is 2#090. Put 2#090 in the Iptc equiv box and click Save; subsequent photo imports will automatically pull city information from the IPTC headers and insert it into the database.

Teams and Advanced Usage

Importing files, capturing metadata, and enabling quality searches might be sufficient for many home photo and video collectors, but ResourceSpace can do more, particularly when it comes to enabling teams to collaborate. A business or project with multiple users and multiple sites might find ResourceSpace an invaluable aid for tracking digital assets and collecting subsets of those assets for specific projects.

ResourceSpace has the special feature Research Requests, written specifically for team usage (Figure 8). A team member can fill out a research request describing a job assignment or opportunity that needs image selections. Other team members can search and save results to the research request just as they would to a personal collection, and ResourceSpace can keep team members notified of the progress via email.

Furthermore, administrators of multi-user systems can take advantage of ResourceSpace user levels to assign specific permissions to accounts that, for example, allow only photographers to upload new images to the system and edit metadata but graphic designers to create research requests. ResourceSpace also can be configured to support multiple user groups, each of which has access to its own private content library, but not to each others. Although much of what is discussed above pertains to local access, ResourceSpace also supports email for user notification, resource sharing, and other communications tasks.

For administrators, ResourceSpace provides user- and resource-oriented statistics and report generation, watermarking, and other features important to enterprise usage. The interface itself can be customized with a flexible plugin system. Plugins already exist to provide RSS export, a SOAP API, web gallery export, and LDAP authentication, among other features.