Gallery indexing experiment

[Brickie]

I was pondering the possibility of indexing all the images in the galleries to enable users to easily find images of interest, which might do away with the need to have umpteen different sets of indexes in the gallery page.

I came up with something like this, in my Google Docs space.

Basically, it's a spreadsheet with a filter. I've populated it with a few builds out of the galleries to give you an idea but the theory is that if every posted picture goes in there, then you can easily find, say, "anything built by Brickie" or "Any 1/48 Spitfires" by combining the filters.

Have a play with it and let me know what you think. The parameters I've put in so far are:

- Builder
- Kit manufacturer
- Scale
- Subject
- Nationality (Britain, France, USA)
- Operator (Royal Navy, Air France, US Marine Corps)
- Era (based on galleries)

But let me know if there's any I've missed.

[JamesPerrin]

Will this do anything that can't be done with the search function?

[JohnRatzenberger]

I like it, you have better control to form a complex query. You also will end up with a list you can scan, manipulate, etc ... even copy for own use.

BTW, I went to the Aviation Gallery to search for "spitfire" and got told the word was excluded as being too common ....

[JohnRatzenberger]

The "build" is fairly "easy", and I don't mean at all to minimize Brickie's efforts here, but then subsequent updates are almost impossible without some automated way to cull out "new since last update" ...

[Brickie]

Hmm.

Yes, putting it all together is fairly straightforward if a little time-consuming.

As for maintaining, I don't mind keeping it up-to-date as it's not like we get zillions and zillions of new pictures every day - but the beauty part of Google Docs, is that I can (and have) set it so anyone can edit it. Obviously there's a risk of vandalism, and that can be got round by a password system, but it means that it belongs to everyone and just happens to be hosted in my Google space.

The new updates thing is a good point, and I had been wondering about that. Perhaps the easiest thing is to add a column that will either read "NEW!" or blank, and every time there's an update one would simply remove the "NEW!" tag from the previous entry at the same time as adding it to the new one. I've just tried it on the index there, and as you can see there are three images tagged as "NEW" so you can simply filter the blanks out if you only want new stuff.

I dunno, it might be that it doesn't really have that much extra functionality over what currently exists, but it was something that came to me while we were talking about the "by country" thing and I thought I'd give it a go and see if it had legs.