Misc Help Topics

The following are a collection of miscellaneous items that didn’t quite belong to other topics.

ImageMagick used to convert/sample/scale images

ImageMagick^® is a free, open-source software suite, used for editing and manipulating digital images. It can be used to create, edit, compose, or convert bitmap images, and supports a wide range of file formats, including JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, and Ultra HDR.

CanDB is written in Java, and the program itself is 100% pure Java other than launcher “candb.exe”. Java is a very good programming language, and its cross-platform GUI support is amazing. However, Java’s PNG/JPG manipulation functions are less than acceptable, and not really possible to resize images smaller and still retain the same quality resolution. Forget about trying to pack in dots during resampling, or ability to add attributes to the images themselves. To that end, CanDB makes use of a public domain C++ product named ImageMagick, http://www.imagemagick.org. While I knew about this program years ago, I sure wish I would have taken the time to learn what it can do, since MAGNITUDES faster for CanDB to automatically scale and resample images from 880 -> 510 -> 310 -> 125 pixels than manually doing it in Photoshop as I did for too many years…

Note: Make sure to define your project information before importing images. ImageMagick is used to insert Copyright, Author info, Website info and such into the copied and scaled images. While CanDB doesn't add any watermark or visible copyright tags on the picture, it uses all possible internal tags when the image is added to your project.

Image sizes / resolution

When photographing beer cans, take as high of resolution images as practical. It is much better had too big of files to start with than to need to retake pictures later. Also, use a product such as Adobe Photoshop to perform the initial cropping and resize of your images. Start at least 880 pixels of height. For MBC and CSS projects, I also resize the images to 880 pixels tall, and crop the canvas to 460 pixels wide, AS WELL AS change the sampling to 1200/dpi. While most computer monitors can only display 72 DPI, resampling to pack as many dots into a given pixel is very important for images scaled to smaller sizes to still look very sharp. For a great article on this topic please view http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/02/the-myth-of-dpi/

MBC and CSS start off with Full images of 880 pixels high, 460 pixels wide. These numbers were chosen years ago based on printing a Full-size image to single printed page in Portrait mode. From there, the Full images are resized/resampled into Large = 510 pixels high, Medium = 310 pixels high, and Small images = 125 pixels high. The 125 pixels were chosen to still retain good quality resolution of the smaller pictures, but to also fit four rows, eight columns when printing pictorials similar to USBC, BCU, Class, etc

Beer Can $(HREF=) variable

There are often a number of similar looking cans, and similar design even between different breweries, and you might want to maintain hyperlinks between the cans. Manually maintaining such links as HTML pages are regenerated frequently, and cans are inserted, deleted, renamed etc would be a maintenance nightmare. Within CanDB when you are entering your “Long Text” and want to add a link to another can, use the $(HREF=) variable and CanDB during HTML generation will add the appropriate link for you.

If you want to add a link to brewery=65, item=24, within “Long Text” enter the variable text $(HREF=65-24), and this variable will be replaced with a hyperlink if the given reference is found. If you want to add a reference to a specific variation, e.g. brewery=80, item=45, variation=2, enter the text $(HREF=80-45.2)

Auto creation of a “Want List”

Notice the HTML tab has an optional content page of “Want List”, and CanDB will generate a composite list and pictorial of all beer cans you have indicated you “want to add to your collection". To mark a given beer can or variation to be on your want list, simply click the "Wanted" check box on the specific Item n tab and regenerate HTML. I find carrying my own personal want list composite and pictorial to shows helps keep track of those missing variations.