V5 development progress - Image indexing and thumbnails

[wrensoft]

This post is short update on one aspect the development process of V5 of Zoom. It covers the up coming image index features and image thumbnail support.

Zoom Search Engine v5.0 introduces a new feature that allows users to search for images such as photographs and diagrams. Searching is carried out by using metadata associated with the file. Image files like JPEGs, PNGs and TIFFs are capable of storing textual data to provide more information about the image as well as technical metadata in the image file that details the photo-taking conditions such as camera make/model, if the flash was on, the shutter speed and aperture value, etc. The ImageInfo plugin extracts this metadata and allows Zoom to index this metadata according to its configuration.

Digital cameras save images as specified by the EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) image file format. The specification uses existing file format such as JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) or TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) with the addition of specific metadata tags.

Further on, a multi-media news exchange format called the Information Exchange Model (IIM) was established to provide additional information, such as caption, news category or dateline. Metadata elements of IIM are quite commonly known as "IPTC headers" of digital image files. ImageInfo extracts this metadata based on the EXIF and IIM standards. While the image files supported by ImageInfo are JPEGs, PNGs*, TIFFs and GIFs, different levels of meta information will be available depending on the file type and the way the file was created.

In addition to indexing meta data Zoom will index the any ALT text associated with an image on a HTML page and any text in the link that points to the image.

It will also be possible to only index images larger than a certain minimum size. (to avoid indexing all the the small images, like buttons, found on a typical web site).

In V5 of Zoom a new item of meta information will be supported, ZOOMIMAGE. This will allow you to associate an image with a
particular page so that it will appear alongside the link in the search
results. To do this, you will need to insert a meta tag on your pages like
so:
<meta name="ZOOMIMAGE" content="mydog.jpg">
You can specify the appearance of the images in your search results by
modifying the CSS in your search template file.

As an alternative to specifying the thumbnail image by metadata you will be able to create a directory that contains all you thumbnail images. The thumbnail and the full image are associated via their file names.

An example of how this looks is below,


Finally if you don't have an image prepared for each of your documents you can instead select to display a fixed icon for all documents of a particular type. e.g. The MS Word icon for all DOC files.



I would also like to remind everyone that we offer free upgrades for 6 months after a purchase, so if you purchase V4 now, it will be a free upgrade to V5 when it becomes available.

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David

[iampedro]

That is great... Do could you support "MHT" format if you don't already. Also support for open office files if you don't already. Also "Zip,RAR & any other type of document that allows for you to just to be able to summarize the search...

Other things such as image search, video search and other searches would be great..

[wrensoft]

MHT is not really an image file format. And we haven't had any requests for its support, at least not from anyone that actually uses it. We'll probably look at Open Office some time soon. But as most of these 'open' file formats are XML based, they should already work with the current version of Zoom.

I am a bit confused about your request for image search as this was the exact topic of my initial post?

We plan on providing searching for other binary files types (.ZIP, .EXE, .MOV, etc..) by their file names, but not on their content in V5.

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David

[wrensoft]

Some additional preliminary documentation explaining the usage of the new image handling features can be found here.
How to index images?
How to customizing image search results layout

[Ray]

You can download a beta version of the image plugin here:
http://www.wrensoft.com/ftp/imageinfo_beta.zip

[Ray]

One of our users asked us if it would be possible to make the search results appear with only thumbnails and nothing else, in a grid-like fashion. We made an grid layout example to illustrate this and thought we'd post it up here for people to see what is possible with some configuring and CSS modifications.

Note that this is just an example, and is one of many possible layouts that can be created with Zoom and CSS.

Below is an actual screenshot of Zoom setup to show thumbnails only:



To achieve this, you will need to turn off all the other elements in the search results (via the Configuration window, under the "Results Layout" tab) so that only the Image is displayed (along with the text link which we can not hide from here - we will do so via CSS).

And then in your search_template.html file, where you can customize the CSS for your search results, you should have the following changes:

.result_title { font-size: 100%; display: none; }

This will hide the search result links so that only the images are shown.

.result_block { margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px; display: inline; }
.result_altblock { margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px; display: inline; }

This will allow the search results to appear next to each other, as opposed to being on separate lines.

You might also want to push the "Result pages" part to the next line with such:

.result_pages { clear: left; }

Further changes could of course be made to get it closer to your ideal appearance. We will update the documentation in the final release with more information on the new CSS classes available in V5.

[AG!]

Hello,

Is it possible to have the image alt text as the actual clickable text as it is much better so have 'title of book' as opposed to 'short title.jpg'.

Or, would it be possible to include it in the RSS output?

Thanks