Image Server


1. What was Image Server?
Image Server was a multi-user software system for receiving, storing, browsing, and retrieving images. The system was composed of client and server software. Server software received, processed and stored images, while client software enabled a user to browse and retrieve images.

2. Why Image Server?
Image Server unified image access for images from different sources. These sources could be agencies, photo reporters, scanners, ... Users could search, browse, view, extract, and refer to images in one universal way independently of the image source.

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3. Client software
Searching, browsing, viewing and retrieving of images from multiple sources was supported. These images could be of different types - bitmap or graphics. The range of images could be contrained with time and source filters.

There were two views for displaying images and their data - tabular and icon view. Icon view displays images in low resolution - thumbnails. Tabular view displayed the data which described the images. The images were sorted according to the order of attribute columns in the tabular view. The order of columns, their width, and whether a column will be displayed or not, could be rearranged by a user visually with a mouse.

Images could be viewed by opening them in one or more windows. The low and high resolution images could be saved on a local file-system by dragging the icon, that represents the image, from the Image Server window to the file-system window. New images could be inserted manually by dragging the image icon onto the Image Server window. The user would then supply some of the attribute data and the image was saved into the image database.

4. Server Software
The data for browsing and searching was stored in standard SQL database. The data could be partitioned among multiple database servers. There were some fixed attributes - database columns - which must be present in the database. Other user defined attributes could be added to the system as required, with user-specified mapping between source data fields and database attributes.

The system supported unlimited number of users working with client applications, and unlimited number of sources. Applications which received images from sources and automatically insert them in the database, e.g agency pictures receivers, did not lay any significant processing burden on the system, because the databases and receiving of images could be distributed to multiple computers. For in-house or third party developers, there was OO-API for developing receiver applications.

The image wrapper format IPTC/NAA was supported. Native image formats supported included EPS and TIFF. Other formats were supported via filter services, which were activated automatically when an image of particular type was accessed. These filter services could be purchased as commercial applications or developed in-house for some unusual image format.

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The time period for keeping the images could be configured by system administrator, so the appropriate amount of images could be kept in the system. The system could automatically delete or archive the news, that reach the time limit. The Image Server allows selective archiving, so only the selected images were archived.

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Image Server summary

fast browsing
tabular view for data, icon view for images

unlimited number of users
standard SQL database for storage

scalability
data stored on multiple database servers

multiple image sources

IPTC/NAA support

multiple image formats
filter services

minimised network traffic
thumbnails, viewfiles

SELECT Technology, Inc.