What type of hierarchical filing system do you use to keep your image files? I finally got some server space and would like to decide on a user friendly system so other people in the plant can view the pictures without having to learn some off the wall filing system. (They paid for the pics, they may as well see them) I would perfer not to use a numbering sytem but rather a real life name for equipment.

Thermography Pictures/Images taken to equipment/panels installed at a plant, at a specific date? Sure, more than a image of same equipment at different times?

What about:
Equipment Id / Date, or
Plant / Equipment ID / Date?

Actually I am in house so the equipment should be about the same, but will have pics from different dates. We are a large paper mill so I guess I would have to start at area, then dept, machine, machine # (different number for different part) then date. Whew

My mistake, by equipment I was refering to the plant machines (motors, generators, boilers, pumps, etc.) not to the thermographic equipment.

I wouldnt get to wrapped up in saving all of the pictures with a file name it will turn into a file naming nightmare. Each picture I take is recorded on a piece of paper or on a word document page which has the complete location spelled out such as location - Mill 2, Equipment - Main control Panel, Component -Starter M4, etc and then list the picture number at the bottom of the page so I know which picture to grab when I do the report. I used to carry 50 copies of my report inspection page on a clip board to fill out everytime I found an anomally that needed recorded. I will label the pictures file in the computer. Photos 2006, IR Images, 6-16-06, and you will know which day they correspond with the inspection which will match the report. Hope this helps sorry if confusing.

Craig

I agree with Craig on the renaming of files.

Separate folders may be useful. Also, if using date, use 'yyyymmdd' format. It sorts better.

If you have FLIR equipment that can do Text Comments, FLIR offers a relatively cheap database software for IR images that can read the text comments imbedded in the images. It's easy to import the images to the database. Once in, you can run queries on the different text comment fields.

I know you did not want to use a numbering system, but this is how I have done our equipment, and may give you an idea to help with yours.

In_my_facility_I_use_a_break_down_from_the_transformer_that_it_is_fed_from.doc (120 Kb, 22 downloads)

The way we handle this is by creating a hierarchy on the network. Something like this; S:\Infrared Then under infrared – images, reports, templates, scanlists. Under each of these we have a list of sites. Maybe Duckwater unit 1, Duckwater unit 2 and so on. When we do our scan we put our images (IR and visible light) in a folder that is named by the month and year of the scan. TIP: Make sure your IR camera and digital camera have as close to the same time as you can get. Then you can sort using the time stamps and you know which IR image goes with which visible light image. Your typical path would then be S:\infrared\images\Duckwater 1\2006 July.
Or S:\infrared\reports\Duckwater 1\2006 July. We may have several reports under the year/month folder. When we put a report in the folder by year/month the report is named so we know what is in it. Also these reports are then printed using a PDF generator and this is what the customer gets.

In our reporting software there are fields that can be setup that pull the attributes for the images. We put the image name in a field we labeled “Reference Number” and the date in a date field. Other fields on the reports are Plant/unit, Elevation, Location, Component and Load. We can then reference back to the IR images using the “Reference Number” for further analysis and reproduction. After we build the report the scratch sheets we used for field comments are trashed because all of the information is in the report. Since most people don’t have the software to look at the raw infrared images at our facilities they are really useless to them.