Well, this one’s a long story that took even longer to put together. It all goes back to last spring when talking about how to sort your pictures was a hot topic. Some did contact prints while others went as far as cataloguing everything in a database. And it got me thinking. While I try and always do a contact print (though I have quite a backlog to print), I often want to have a better sorting system. I used to have a big spreadsheet just for that, but it was before I changed my entire filing system. So now, I needed something quite robust yet simple. Just having an Excel sheet seemed limited in a way. So, while I had some spare time over the summer, I decided to tempt fate and build a database from scratch. Needless to say, I had never done anything like that before and quickly learned I never will do anything like that again! This project could be simply qualified as a major pain.
The thing is all the databases I looked at were geared to the indexing of single digital images. While I could simply create empty images with the proper tags and use something like Picasa, I thought at the time that it would be faster and easier to manage a single Access database. So I set out to learn how to program a database in the only language I know: Visual Basic. And this led me to something else: using a full year’s worth of swear words in a few weeks! But finally, I did manage to get something that works surprisingly well. It’s not blazing fast but it allows me to enter an unmentionable amount of information and to search through it with relative ease.
The system is built in such a way that it can support multiple photographers, multiple cameras. It automatically creates a unique serial number for each film which can be truncated starting from the end. It even can catalog individual frames from a film. It stores location information so you know where the image was taken. The only thing that doesn’t work yet is the geocoded information. It also stores film, exposure, processing, lens, aperture, flash, camera, date, frame, film type, keywords and description. You name it, I think it’s in there!
As usual, there are no instructions. I call it the play and learn system.
Anyways, I do hope you find it useful if you choose to use it. I know there are bugs in it, but nothing really bad that will make you lose any data. As for me, I’m pretty much retiring this project on start so that what is currently not working probably will stay like that (until I get annoyed by it and decide to give it an update)
Here is the link to the file on my Google Drive. I didn't bother making a nice installer using Innosetup so you're stuck with the old ugly Microsoft installer that came with Visual Basic.
(See a newer message down the thread for what I think is a better version I made)
And here's the screenshot
