I'm sure lots of forum members hold personal picture collections. Obviously we have the fantastic public collection pictures such as those from Georges, Frank, Juan, Pantazis etc. not forgetting the puzzle database here on this site. I think it would be nice to have a fully comprehensive database of images. I am not talking about a database with one picture of every puzzle, I'm talking about a twisty puzzle picture database, labelled, sorted, and fully comprehensive.

Feel free to post your personal picture collections here (in archive format) and I will happily filter duplicates and continuously collate them into a comprehensive database.

Could you explain what exactly you mean by fully comprehensive.
I can look up words in a dictionary, but as English isn't my mother tongue, I have difficulties understanding.
A small example would be very helpful.
Thank you.

I believe what he means is this. There are tons of pictures of tons of puzzles taken from all imaginable angles outside, as well as inside (internals). It would be interesting to gather them under a representative picture of a puzzle, and thus have access to them all in one place. I've thought of that as well, but I don't have the guts or time to make that happen, I guess. This is a very ambitious initiative. Also, this will have to make do with pictures of very different quality. I think it will not be easy to keep it at certain level of quality and not to make it into some kind of a dumpster of all pictures for a particular puzzle.

Yes that's it Aleksey. To clarify, I am talking about gathering every picture in one place.

Thank you both for the clarification.
One problem persists: my database, even as an archive, is rather huge: between 500 Mb and 1 Gb.
I don't want to take away that much space on the twistypuzzles.com server.

That is a problem. Assuming everything is on your site, I could "wget" the images? Or a service like http://transferbigfiles.com/?

If something like that happens, I would love to see meaningful user written articles included.

IE viewtopic.php?p=85537#p85537

Yes. I would like to include such writeups. Where information is sparse I will collate/make calls for it and it will be included.

Cool idea, but you would definitely need a server capable of holding and transferring lots of large files. You should definitely use thumbnails to save space (and only show the entire image if the user clicks on it), but it's still a huge undertaking. Good luck! I hope you can still get images off the old twisty threads..

I can split up the database. I have folders on my harddisk like 2x2x2, 3x3x3 a.s.o.
Also I can temporarily upload archive files to helm.lu into an upload folder where you can download them from.

I have my own (virtual) server hosted by my provider with 10GB of free space.
Less than 4GB are currently used.
I have already included some options to allow people to upload pictures themselves
and could extend the features (tell me, what you want).
Of course it would need my time to progrma this, so please don't expect it next weekend
But server space and the interest for extension are there.
I'd be careful with videos so far, they are very space consuming. I'd propose to start with
links to external resources so far (that's possible today already) and see how it develops.

My database offers the option to create "categories" for grouping puzzles by self defined
criterias for everyone. These categories can be
- visible and editable privately (for your own interest)
- visible to everyone, but editable privately (e.g. for private collections)
- visible and editable by everyone (common interest)
By default there are two categories: custom and factory build puzzles as a first approach.
Some more categories are defined already. Because I found, that there are a lot of different
approaches to group puzzles (most of them being really reasonable) I decided not to have
a static structure, but to allow to create individual groupings.

Cheers - Frank

Like Georges I have my puzzle collection divided into folders on my hard drive. You're welcome to them if you want, but will have to walk me through how to send them out. Keep in mind though that Georges probably has everything I have so it might be easier to take from him first and use me as a last resort. I have a feeling he's more tech savy than I.

Mine is categorised in a slightly different way, that is, by using filenames
with a quite explanatory title, e.g. masth_3x3x3_deluxe_yellow.JPG
(which means a mathematical puzzle cube 3x3x3 whose logo sticker is on the yellow center tile).

Each photo in a category starts with the same name, and obvioulsy,
each category starts with a different name, e.g. "maths_ball_", "maths_magic_",
"maths_sliding_", "wooden_", "maze_", etc etc etc.

And I could certainly "apple-load" all files for downloading.




Pantazis


PS. I would prefer if some wiki-like project could start about this, based on this forum.

I tried the same approach and came up with this problem:
What kind of hierarchy should be used?
Shape_mechanism_color "TraijbersOctahedron4x4x4White"
or
Mechanism_Shape_color "4x4x4TraijbersOctahedronWhite"
or
color_shape_mechnism "WhiteTraijbersOctahedron4x4x4"
Sometimes I want to look at all Traijber-variants, at all puzzles based on 4x4x4s, etc.
=> Organizing pictures with one fixed hierarchy isn't sufficient.

My 2 cents

Actually, it *can* be sufficient, *if* it is defined correctly.
What I mean is, we must give priorities, e.g.:

A folding puzzle takes the shape of the cube when solved.
A 3x3x3 cube has already the shape of a cube.

So folding puzzles are higher in that hierarchy because it
would not work out the other way. The same concept may
be applied with the rest of the puzzles characteristics.
That helps a lot with some mathematical puzzles which
can be placed in the "labyrinth" category, which in my list
is one of the lowest in the hierarchy.




Pantazis

Since I'm using a database to browse through my puzzle pictures, as well offline as in my gallery online, I have the possibility to search by keyword for instance. I can even search the title, file name, description or a combination of these or of course in all the fields.
I am in the process of adding keywords to the pictures.
For instance if I search for 'verdes' I'll find all the v-cube pictures (if I haven't forgotten to add 'verdes' somewhere in one of the above-mentioned fields).
This permits to find all 7x7x7 v-cube pictures when searching for 'verdes', 'olympic', '7x7x7', 777 (part of file name) a.s.o.

Exactly.
That's the best approach. File names shouldn't be 'misused' for that.
Of course I see, that it is not possible for everyone to provide these features.
A good idea for my Lib, too. I'll put it on the list