As a busy pottery studio owner, teacher and collaborator, I don’t struggle to organize all the physical ceramic pieces that are created in our studio by a couple hundred people each month. However, as learning and development of techniques and glazes is an ongoing process, it is the work that has passed through my space that I long to better reference and sort. Like many others, I capture digital data (mainly images and videos) daily. However, I have yet to find the perfect way to sort, store and recall exactly what I need in a quick and EASY fashion. Information retrieval systems are on the rise. Due to, “…(T)he explosive growth of multimedia data, automatic multimedia tagging has attracted great interest of various research communities…” (p. 25:1, Wang, Hua & Chua).
Over the past month, I have read much about automatic image tagging, tag-image association matrixes (TIAM), collaborative filtering, content-based image retrieval (CBIR) and nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF). This week, I have been sampling apps on my phone and have highlighted three very different, but useful applications. Here is a quick (3.5 minute) video giving you a taste of them!
Pottery Log – This app is widely used in my industry. It stores a LOT of data for each piece you enter into the system. The process is onerous, and not all entered data is searchable. I would not use it often, nor to the extent that it is intended. Perhaps it is more effective for a beginning potter? Or a ceramics student?
Slidebox – This app opened my photo roll and set me straight to organizing them all. I created folders and easily sorted photos. I particularly liked the quick slide-up to delete function. The folders were later easy to navigate, though I was not able to sort through images or create different groupings. I will keep using this app to sort ALL of my photos and videos.
Photo Tagger – This app also sent me straight into my photo roll. I was able to create my own tags and add multiple tags to images. The deletion process was not as easy, but I was able sort and re-sort based different tags. This seems the most useful for locating pottery images later, based on set constraints. I will keep this on my phone for now, but am hoping to find one that blends Slidebox features and ease with tagging features and a built-in search function.
References
Wang, M., Ni, B., Hua, X., & Chua, T. (2012). Assistive tagging: A survey of multimedia tagging with human-computer joint exploration. ACM Computing Surveys, 44(4), 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1145/2333112.2333120
Zhou, N., Cheung, W. K., Qiu, G., & Xue, X. (2011). A hybrid probabilistic model for unified collaborative and content-based image tagging. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 33(7), 1281-1294. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPAMI.2010.204
This really caught my attention! While I’m not a potter and therefore approach data storage and retrieval from a different perspective, managing photos and memories is an extraordinary challenge for me. Data storage and retrieval is an area that will continue to be a significant investment for digital users, and every app that makes it easier will have great value. Nice work with this!