Newsletter
Sunday, October 22, 2000

by Robert A. Chant

Here's another quick update for all following my on-going saga.

The scripts for the photo database are complete, and I had begun the process of putting our collection online. I hit a major hurdle when I ran out of disk space (about the 110 Meg mark) and requested more space from TrainWeb. I needed about 400 Meg to finish the upload; here is my response from Steve:

"I just passed your request to our systems people and they almost had a heart attack! We won't turn down any reasonable request for space, but with such a sizeable request, we have to make sure there isn't a problem with the material being uploaded."

The problem was that our photos were too large; TrainWeb has set a limit on file size of 130K, anything above that is a problem. Many of our photos are above this range, so I had two choices. Either not use the photos, or modify the jpeg compression ratio, of course I choose the latter.

There are many products on the market that will allow a user to modify the compression ratio in "bulk" but after trying a few, the results were very disappointing. The image files that were produced were of very low quality, and I wasn't happy.

Although I knew it would be a huge project to modify 4,000+ photos individually, I know it is something I need to do. Using my Photoshop software I can reduce the file size of the photos by over 50% (in most cases) without a loss in quality. So for the next little while, I will be stuck at this snag.

As I reduce the file size, I am also cataloging all the photos we have. Each will be classified by railway, unit, model, location of photo, date of photo and photographer/source. When all is said and done, we will be able to extract photos from the database on any of the criteria.

And oh, BTW, I changed the format of the site, did ya notice??

Sincerely,
Robert A. Chant

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