Jonny asks "...is there a way to search the photo galleries for a particular boat?"

I have been grappling (or trying to grapple) with this question for the last couple of months, in connection with another JRA project. It is an interesting question, and I float my conclusions here, in the hopes that someone will chime in and tell me if I am wrong, or suggest a better approach.

Leaving aside A.I. possibilities, searching a media gallery with a conventional search engine amounts to searching image titles (or file names, or “tags”) for matching words or phrases.

Therefore, the problem “reduces” to finding an information-rich way of labelling or tagging the images. As far as I can see, it needs to be done by hand, and an image may have many attributes – but you can only pack so much into a caption.

A compromise, which would probably cover most enquiries, is to try to ensure that each photo in the gallery has, as part of its filename, or title, the owner name, boat name or both. Beyond that, it is difficult to know what can be done. That would not provide for someone who wants to search for “tabernacle” or “two-masted” or “wingsail” etc, unless the curator has added those sorts of attribute to the tag. Going through a photo gallery of hundreds or thousands and doing the tagging – or even one at a time as the photos are added to the gallery, is probably too great a task, and going beyond “boat name” and/or "owner name" is usually not practical.

As an aside: The slide show gallery on the website homepage used to cause me the same kind of wish, but in recent years some dedicated person has gone through and added boat names to the images, which has no doubt pleased a lot of people. Another archive we have on the website is the Boat of the Month archive – you can scroll through that and search manually for boat names – and from there, find a brief introduction to the boat.  Approaching 200 documented boats there, and growing. That archive could be made searchable by boat name and by owner name. Not too great a project.

There is also the “Knowledge Base” tool, on the homepage, which I have found useful when searching for past magazine articles.

And don't forget the obvious - you can search the membership directory by boat name and/or by owner name.

But there is nothing so far which quite satisfies Jonny’s request, which is to be able to search through a gallery of images, land on one and then aquire information about it.

From editing the magazine, I now have an image gallery which comprises every image that has been used in a magazine article since magazine #97, amounting already to something approaching 1,000 images, and continuing to grow. Some of these images are well worth revisiting and will have continuing value. 

How to curate such a large gallery and make it available for people to browse, and search?  I am trying to come up with a manageable way for people to browse this growing galley and quickly find information about an image which might be of interest. To enable this, each image, as it goes into a magazine article, is given brief consideration by the editor as to whether it is likely to have special value and needs to be tagged. It is a subjective decision. All or any photo could be tagged, but too many becomes hopelessly unwieldy. The good news is: it is sufficient if just one good photo from each article is tagged, although two is OK. Those tagged will have boat name, or owner name, or author name, usually no other tag, although exceptions are allowed. The result is a much smaller, browsable, curated gallery of thumbnail-size tagged photos, which the person browsing can scroll through, or search by word or phrase – and select. On selecting, the full-size photo appears, also the article in which the photo appeared, and in addition, every other image which appeared in that same article. By this two-step process the persistent searcher can find out as much as he/she likes about the photo of choice, while the more casual searcher can just browse and not be flooded with information. The prototype is working, and if accepted by the committee will be open for members to check out quite soon. I think it will be a novel way of answering, to some extent, Jonny’s request.

I have misgivings about AI (although using it quite a lot at present) and although it has potential for image searching, I personally don’t want to go down that road. I prefer the above idea. It depends though, on two very human attributes: the judgement of the curator in tagging the right photos, and the persistence of the searcher, who can delve as deeply as he/she likes. Not perfect, but it will be handy, I think.

[I forgot to mention: from her years of editing the magazine Lynda left a database of images, labelled by boat name, and sorted alphabetically. That too is a potentially valuable historical resource which deserves to be curated and made available. A massive collection, over 280 alphabetically labelled folders, almost each folder being a boat, and insider the folders 3,180 files, occupying 11.9 GP of disk space. I am working on making this available also, via a digital magazine library. This archive is easily searchable by boat name.]