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Question about a project involving MySQL (Read 583 times)
homeybeg
Question about a project involving MySQL
Sep 29th, 2008, 4:47am  
Hello everyone! This is my first post on this wonderful site. I have just a little bit of experience with processing and I am working through as many tutorials and hacking as many available source codes as I can. I have only about a month worth of experience with Processing but I am learning as much as I can from this website's resources as well as the books that Ben Fry and Casey Reas and Ira Greenburg have authored.

I am working on a project that involves accessing a large amount (~2500) of satellite photos. I want to locate these images quickly using a satellite image website such as Flash Earth, Microsoft Visual Earth, Google Maps etc. and save them quickly so that I can put them into Photoshop to be batched processed. I have an idea that the program will have to access a database for these satellite photos or the program/website (most likely Flash Earth) using  longitude and latitude coordinates, save these photos, and export them to a database maintained through MySQL.

I don't know much about MySQL (except that it can be used through PHP as a a place to save website templates) or the capabilities of Processing as a means of implementing this type of program. A friend who is a Comp. Sci. major suggested the MySQL path because I want to save them through a type of batch process and it would be easier to save all the images. Thus far, this has been the most difficult part of the project.

I was wondering if anyone here has resources I can look at, suggestions about the program or its logic or other less complicated ways to do this. I figure the amount of time it would take me to create a program to do this would save me hours upon hours of tedious photo finding, file saving, renaming and organization on the hard drive. Feel free to ask any specific questions.  
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PhiLho 
Re: Question about a project involving MySQL
Reply #1 - Oct 2nd, 2008, 2:07pm  
Disclaimer: I am not a database specialist!
But I believe, and saw some advices along these lines, that you should not use a database to store big blobs of binary data.
At least, I see no advantage of doing that over storing the files on the filesystem, either with flat storage (all files in the same folder, using the names, for example, to pick the coordinates) or with a more or less complex system of folders (eg. splitting the area with a grid, grouping images of a given grid cell in a folder).

Now, perhaps I just misinterpreted your request. I am not too sure of the place of the database in your plans.

If I understand correctly, you plan to query Web sites for providing satellite images and to save them for further processing. There are various ways to do that, using Java's network capabilities, using a scripting language, using cURL to get the images, etc.
Likewise, having not Photoshop, I would use ImageMagick to process the photos, it would probably have less overhead.

These are just generic advices, not knowing exactly your needs. I hope that helps a little.

[EDIT] Funnily I just found an interesting debate on using DB to store images or not: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3748/storing-images-in-db-yea-or-nay
Looks like there is a large consensus against... (but the pros are interesting).
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« Last Edit: Oct 3rd, 2008, 9:54pm by PhiLho  »  
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