Welcome to the Geological Sciences Slide collection!

Server and software updated 3/21/06

This is the entry page for the Web iPhoto Access -based service of the departmental slide collection. A few tips are in order before setting you loose:

1. The albums are the trays as digitized. I'll add some descriptive information later so you can find your way to the material you want by old trays. Later we can build some albums that cross over the old trays and include material that belongs together (we might then lose the old tray descriptions).
2. Periods were removed from titles earlier, so searches should avoid including periods. States are frequently abbreviated by postal abbreviation. Formation is usually Fm or sometimes Frm. Rock name abbreviations are not too uncommon either (ss, ls, sh for instance). Landforms are most populous in the collection, so searches on scarp or dune will turn up a lot of slides (but not all that have scarps or slides)
3. Searching is best done from the "Advanced" link once you have logged in. This will search normally or through a grep-ish styly syntax if so chosen.
4. Once you have images on the screen, the magnifying glass will reveal the image as large as it was scanned; the slides icon will go to a slideshow mode of display.
5. You can select slides for downloading in batch by clicking on them in the thumbnail view. The images will be outlined in yellow. Once you have selected all that you want, then click the download link at the top of the page (it will say NN photos to download, with download the link). From a Mac, you can import the files into your own iPhoto by using the command in the uncompressed archive; this will pass on any keywords, etc., that the photo has on the server.

That should get you going. Head on off and see how this works; for now, log in as guest. There are a number of slides that apparently never were included in the old html version of the slide index, so you might find some new things. And, as is discussed in greater detail below, adding new slides is pretty easy in this system.

Take me to the slides!

Additional details and the future

How this works: Wed iPhoto Access lives on top of iPhoto, taking advantage of the database iPhoto makes when you toss in images. Any time we add something to iPhoto, the then sucks it up and displays it as well. This avoids our usual headache of having to build piles of links for you to find anything new. The software is shareware (and no charge at the moment), so it isn't the most robust out there, and our hardware isn't remotely the fastest. But if this looks good, we'll see about getting some better hardware, and the software is being developed by a fairly responsive developer.

Can you add anything? Yes, please! If you have digital images and can put them somewhere where I can see them (on a server somewhere), then it is pretty straightforward to add them. Please don't ask us to put up publisher's CD-ROM material; it is copyrighted (on the other hand, USGS material is not, should there be any of that we should keep handy). Images needn't be small: Web iPhotoAccess rescales photos so you don't get overwhelmed unless you really want to see the huge image. If the files have descriptive names (not PIC00023.jpg but Aerial view of Flatirons.jpg) that makes things simple. If not, you'd probably want to change the names or add a caption in iPhoto on the server. We can set up sharing of the library, which would make this easy to do from your desk.

Can we fix the captions/titles? Again, easy so long as somebody will do a little typing. iPhoto is pretty easy to use to add captions, search for photos, and add keywords. And if you have a Mac, we can share the photo library via iPhoto to your Mac (ask me how). Or sit down for a little bit at the server and fix away.

The future: If this is a help, we want to both improve the computer serving this and gradually upgrade the images, especially the files scanned at about 480 pixels wide. If you want to complain about specific images that you would like to have in better shape, send me mail. If we have quite a list, I'll see about getting some funds to rescan a bunch of those. We can do a lot better (see the Scanning page made awhile back to see how much better we can do with an automatic system, even with old, discolored slides). Making suggestions or even just saying occasionally that the scans are useful is very helpful to me in deciding how much effort I should put into this and to the department in determining how much money should be allocated.