TB as a repository of graphic files

[Admin edit: I added some line breaks to assist legibility - no censure implied]

Folks, this is a simple question (but multipart) about whether it is prudent to use TB in a certain manner before I go ahead and invest time to do so. I read newspapers online, routinely capturing a screenshot of articles that interest me. The capture takes the form of a cropped screenshot on the iPad that snaps the story as it appears in the e-version of the newspaper. The e-version of the mastheads that I use, copy how the publication looks in the paper version in a special iPad app distributed by the newspaper publisher. As a result of this practice, I have hundreds, perhaps thousands of articles that I’ve accumulated over time, stored in the Apple Photos application. I’m proposing to export all of these and then progressively import them into TB notes - with appropriate metatagging - to enable retrieval and also establish cross reference links to allow the captured articles to be overlaid with a metadata structure that will help me tap them for my research purposes.

Apologies for this lengthy preamble. My questions are:

  1. Can TB maintain its speed and stability when fairly large graphic files are imported into notes at scale (up to thousands)

  2. Can notes have a newspaper article - in graphic form - dragged into them and display the full graphic, or a selected part of a graphic, in a TB map?

  3. Is there any ability to further annotate a graphic that is contained in a TB note after the graphic is dragged into the note?

  4. What kind of speed performance degradation - if any - would be expected as the number of notes containing a graphic increases - say at the 100, 1000, 3,000 and 5000 marks?

  5. Can a group of notes containing newspaper article graphics at different points in a map be selected to print out (displaying the full attached graphic for each note, when printed)?

  6. what ability exists to influence the layout (eg note arrangement) when the notes with the newspaper article graphics attached that are displayed in an onscreen map, are printed?

  7. Are the graphics that are dragged into a note all stored in an OSX folder somewhere that can be accessed via the OSX Finder, separately from access through TB?

  8. If a graphic that is attached to a note, is accessed via OSX Finder and edited (eg some yellow highlight applied to relevant passages) outside of TB, will TB “refresh” the version of the graphic attached to the note in TB to reflect the editing update (where the editing is done in Apple Preview or similar graphic editor)?

  9. If a graphic capture of a newspaper article is OCR’d, will tinderbox allow the editable text to be highlighted and copied from within the graphic when it is attached to a TB note?

  10. Is there a way to have TB read the date at which the graphic was captured from the graphic’s file metadata and automatically insert that into a tag attribute of the note that becomes the graphic’s home when the graphic is dropped into the TB note?

  11. If an OCR is done for a newspaper graphic, is it possible for TB to apply its neural processing to recognise, say, the name of companies mentioned in the newspaper article and extract those to the relevant tag attribute of the note?

  12. Is there any reason to avoid dragging more than one graphic (representing a screen grabbed newspaper article) into a note so that a note contains more than one article on the same topic? Eg does a note become unwieldy or unstable if it contains too many graphic attachments?

Hope all this makes sense. I would expect this use case has relevance in some other contexts too: police investigators who deal with large numbers of photos of suspects and crime scenes, barristers who arrange extensive photographic evidence for use in trials, investigative journalists etc. By the way, loving TB 8 - great improvements (as usual). Regards, JR.

Images are not Tinderbox’s forté, and Tinderbox isn’t a repository.

I don’t think this will be a profitable approach. You want DEVONthink or possibly Curio.

Carriage returns are helpful.

I wouldn’t consider Tinderbox for most if not all of the cases described in the original post. Graphics imported into Tinderbox are binary-encoded in the single XML file for each Tinderbox document. Importing perhaps thousands of images into Tinderbox will result in an engorged file roughly 1,000 times the size of a single image file.

And so on.

For your particular uses cases, which center around document management – specifically graphics and PDFs – look into DEVONthink, or Keep It, or Eagle Filer, etc.

(I would avoid using Curio for this many files – Curio is also not a document repository and will get crushed by the proposed workload.)

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Thanks for the swift and wise reply. Will keep using TB for other things - but just not this one. Cheers, J

I concur the above. But, looking at #4 and the number of items, I’m wondering if a better startpoint would be an image database/DAM** tool. You are basically managing 000s of images (of unstated size/res, but probably not small) with some metadata. So the textual part is minor. You need something with the design to manage loads of image, do thumb-nailing/re-purposing and all the other DAM actions implicit in the list above.

** Digital Asset Management

Re #9 - no Tinderbox doesn’t read text from OCR’d docs (because that’s simply not part of it’s design - not because no one needs to do that).

That said my days doing DAM are somewhere back and at the end of that the time Aperture and Lightroom pretty much killed off the desktop image database product sector.

It might be worth checking out the open-source tool tropy.

If you want to do more than simply manage graphics/images/scans, it might be worthwhile to look into QDA software. I know that ATLAS.ti allows you to work extensively with graphics and PDFs; highlighting, tagging, commenting on parts of images and OCR’ed text. Social scientists use QDA software in much the same way you describe a police officer using a software tool for her investigations. Here is a list of similar software.

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Tinderbox is useful for QDA – just not for storing the documents.

Oh, and buy a lottery ticket before placing the ATLAS.ti order – you’ll need the money :smile:

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