[ok-scotland] Another view of images

Mon Nov 10 12:50:58 UTC 2014

....and remaining on the servers for years and years, growing in size,
but never changing in terms of usefulness - of which, there is mostly,
none :-)

Thanks for your kind words Alan.

Dave

>>> <Alan.Aitken at scotland.gsi.gov.uk> 10/11/2014 12:43 >>>

Dave – I kind of agree, but I think the issue is as much information
management as it is disk or camera management. I suspect that a lot of
the noise would disappear if the images were subject to the same kind of
information management criteria that are applied to documents. If
they’re not, everything can just be dumped in the central bucket, to
be forgotten about a month afterwards.
Alan Aitken

From: ok-scotland [mailto:ok-scotland-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf
Of David Stafford
Sent: 10 November 2014 10:41
To: ok-scotland at lists.okfn.org
Subject: [ok-scotland] Another view of images

Hello,

I have a somewhat different view of this whole issue...I will leave the
copyright / public domain arguments to you, I am sure you will sort it
all out to satisfaction of all parties, but I have another issue I want
to raise, which has to do with this quote: 

"Scotland has a lot more to gain from people using these fruits of
public labour with a camera than it does by hampering them".

First of all, I agree with this sentiment - we do want any valid
photographs, that have historical value, to be available to all if
possible.  At the same time, if there is a valid copyright claim by a
photographer, or a Council, and there is reason for the photos NOT to be
in the public domain - then we should respect that.

Personally, I also agree with the thought that we should protect the
public domain, I agree that it's inferred, and we should care about
that.  But that is also, not my issue.

My issue is the behaviour of local authority staff, whose obsession
with photography, borders on the criminal.  I feel that "these fruits of
public labour" have been, perhaps, over-picked, and a lot of that
"labour" was a waste of time and money (in recent years, I mean; not the
historical photos from the first war - obviously - those were,
comparatively, chosen with care, and not surrounded by hundreds of
useless photos of nothing in particular).

·	   Yes - we need to take photographs as evidence - evidence of
the condition of assets, or buildings, or vehicles, whatever - for
insurance purposes.

·	   Yes - we need to take photographs as evidence - evidence that
may be required in possible court cases, we want to establish evidence
photographically that will protect us if we have to go to court.

·	   Yes - we should photograph civic events, political events,
historical events, and even life events.  As we see, in 50 or 100 years,
some of these photographs become important, because they chronicle
events that are important, historically, and I think it's fantastic that
we have these photos from the first war now, as a window into a long
past time - our history.

I am concerned, however, that the photographs we are taking now, are
not concise, they are not mapping out clearly, evidential or historical
value, and, there is such a glut of files to look at, it's difficult to
see the wood for the trees, never mind finding valuable images in a
giant Forest of high resolution digital images...

I have no issue with any of the legitimate reasons for photography (in
the bullet points above).  But, what I do object to, is the way in which
local authority staff have gone slightly - or sometimes, massively,
"digital camera mad"; with the advent of the digital camera, suddenly,
it became possible to take, say, 300 eighteen megapixel images, in one
day; then, bring them back in to work, and "dump" the camera's card onto
the network.  Repeat, for a decade, hundreds of users taking photos
daily, then dumping them onto Council servers; until said servers are
literally overflowing with high resolution images.

If you are a medium sized Council, with say, three to five thousand
employees, some hundreds of which, have been issued digital cameras, it
start to become a problem over a period of time like a decade - so the
hundreds of photographers that a modern Council have now, taking
hundreds of pictures every single day, then, dumping the mass of high
resolution onto your limited Council storage - all I can say is, it's an
IT nightmare, and over 10 years, the number of meaningless, out of
focus, badly shot, duplicated and other useless "photographs" that are
taking up precious disk space, that are useless as evidence for
insurance or court actions, that are useless as recordings of civic,
political or life events - they are just digital "noise", and they exist
in such quantities, that they threaten to overwhelm the normal Council
data with their Large Megapixel Presence.

Sensible past activities, such as photographing physical assets, say,
bridges, for the purposes of establishing their condition - have
transformed, whereas, in the past, we might have taken a handful of
images of a bridge, now, because of digital cameras, we go out for our
Bridge Inspection, and come back with 80 or 90 very repetitive close ups
of brickwork, and really, only 12 of them make any sense as evidence -
the rest, are just wasteful.

No one ever deletes their "bad shots".  No one ever seems to delete any
photographs.   No one ever seems to be concerned with limiting the
quantity of evidential photographs taken.  No one tries to be thrifty in
terms of disk space, always setting the cameras on the highest
resolution possible; always taking many dozens or even hundreds of shots
each day (I wish that was MY job, taking pictures all day long every
day!) instead of taking a sensible, small, logical number of medium
resolution shots. 

Over ten years, these new "digital camera" activities, results in a
huge, huge number of very large, disk-space eating images being stored
across Council servers; taking up remarkably large percentages of said
servers, and when you reach eighty, ninety thousand photos of
bridges...well, that is just ludicrous, no one could ever even make
sense of that many photographs, much less use them as evidence.

So it would be my suggestion that each of us look at the use of cameras
in our own organisations, and decide if they are being used
appropriately (for evidence for insurance, for evidence for court
actions, for evidence of civic, political, historical or life events -
in moderation, of course) or not - and if not, change your policies, get
people to take FEWER shots, use a LOWER resolutions, otherwise, in a
hundred years, our descendants will be utterly baffled by hundreds of
thousands of photographs of basically, nothing - and unable to make
sense of the "history", because, instead of it being preserved in a
small number of carefully chosen shots, it's a massive glut of digital
images, most of which, are nothing but a waste of space and time.

Seriously - have your IT department scan for all of the most common
image types across your servers (I can provide a list of extensions if
need be, but it should be pretty obvious), the tool I use for this is
called "Tree Size Pro" - you may be surprised.  I think that giving out
lots of digital cameras to lots of staff, is not a good idea; I think
that cameras should only be issued to a very few staff, who have all had
special training in the use and care of digital cameras:

they know not to "dump" the entire camera onto the network; 

they know not to take photos at full resolution unless there is a very
good reason for it;

they know how to adjust the resolution settings on their cameras; 

they know that 12 images will work where 90 aren't needed; and so
on...

- they have "common sense digital camera training", and I think this
will go a long, long way towards solving some of these problems.

Apologies for going way off topic, it's really a new topic, but it
seemed to make sense to me, off the back of the copyright/public domain
questions, I felt that there are some more basic questions, such as, do
we really NEED all of the photographs we take?  My answer is, no,
absolutely not - we only need a small percentage of them - which would
also have the added benefit, of returning a lot of eminently useful disk
space, back to Council staff to use for documents and other non-image
Council information.

I hope this is helpful, it's meant to be helpful, not critical - I
think we need to be thrifty wherever we can, and conserving disk space -
in this case, quite a lot of disk space, this is one small way we can
help our Councils save money.  And, develop good digital camera
behaviours as opposed to bad digital camera behaviours - which
definitely need to be put behind us.

Please discuss, I keep wondering if I am the only person that feels
this way?

All the very best,

Dave

This email was scanned by the Government Secure Intranet anti-virus
service supplied by Vodafone in partnership with Symantec. (CCTM
Certificate Number 2009/09/0052.) In case of problems, please call your
organisations IT Helpdesk.
Communications via the GSi may be automatically logged, monitored
and/or recorded for legal purposes.
*********************************** ********************************
This email has been received from an external party and
has been swept for the presence of computer viruses.
******************************************************************** 
****************************************************************** This
email and any attachments are intended solely for the individual or
organisation to which they are addressed and may be confidential and/or
legally privileged.  If you have received this email in error please
forward it to servicedesk at stirling.gsx.gov.uk and then delete it. 
Please check this email and any attachments for the presence of viruses
as Stirling Council accepts no liability for any harm caused to the
addressees' systems or data.  Stirling Council may monitor its email
system.  Stirling Council accepts no liability for personal emails.

**********************************************************************
This e-mail (and any files or other attachments transmitted with it) is
intended solely for the attention of the addressee(s). Unauthorised use,
disclosure, storage, copying or distribution of any part of this e-mail
is not permitted. If you are not the intended recipient please destroy
the email, remove any copies from your system and inform the sender
immediately by return.

Communications with the Scottish Government may be monitored or
recorded in order to secure the effective operation of the system and
for other lawful purposes. The views or opinions contained within this
e-mail may not necessarily reflect those of the Scottish Government.

Tha am post-d seo (agus faidhle neo ceanglan còmhla ris) dhan neach neo
luchd-ainmichte a-mhàin. Chan eil e ceadaichte a chleachdadh ann an
dòigh sam bith, a’ toirt a-steach còraichean, foillseachadh neo
sgaoileadh, gun chead. Ma ’s e is gun d’fhuair sibh seo le gun fhiosd’,
bu choir cur às dhan phost-d agus lethbhreac sam bith air an t-siostam
agaibh, leig fios chun neach a sgaoil am post-d gun dàil. 

Dh’fhaodadh gum bi teachdaireachd sam bith bho Riaghaltas na h-Alba air
a chlàradh neo air a sgrùdadh airson dearbhadh gu bheil an siostam ag
obair gu h-èifeachdach neo airson adhbhar laghail eile. Dh’fhaodadh nach
eil beachdan anns a’ phost-d seo co-ionann ri beachdan Riaghaltas na
h-Alba. 
**********************************************************************

The original of this email was scanned for viruses by the Government
Secure Intranet virus scanning service supplied by Vodafone in
partnership with Symantec. (CCTM Certificate Number 2009/09/0052.) This
email has been certified virus free.
Communications via the GSi may be automatically logged, monitored
and/or recorded for legal purposes.

******************************************************************

This email and any attachments are intended solely for the individual or 
organisation to which they are addressed and may be confidential and/or 
legally privileged.  If you have received this email in error please 
forward it to servicedesk at stirling.gsx.gov.uk and then delete it.  
Please check this email and any attachments for the presence of viruses 
as Stirling Council accepts no liability for any harm caused to the 
addressees' systems or data.  Stirling Council may monitor its email system.  
Stirling Council accepts no liability for personal emails.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/ok-scotland/attachments/20141110/6dd051cc/attachment-0003.html>