Siliceous and Delicious

Gave myself a little bit of a rest this morning, as a reward for successes yesterday—took about an hour to leisurely give the houseplants a bath, as they had accumulated a thick layer of dust and were looking very dry and sad. Then turned my attention to fixing the remaining bits missing from the interface, one of which is to record the objective/magnification of the images taken. I thought I’d be able to do this by adding or modifying an entry to the JPEG EXIF metadata, but once I’d found the appropriate function I spent quite a bit of time trying to do this and not understanding why it wouldn’t work. It was only when I read the manual (I know, I know… if all else fails!) that I realized that—bizarrely—ImageJ only supports saving metadata for TIFF and ZIP file formats, but not for JPGs. Very odd, but at least it explains what was going on. Saving the files as TIFFs isn’t a great option, as the file size balloons from ~600KB per file to ~30MB. I’m reluctant to add a field to the SQL database to contain this info, because that would mean tweaking both the database set-up, and several functions within the R program that handle formulating the SQL INSERT statements. Not that it’d be a lot of work—but the thing works and I don’t want to risk introducing bugs.

Aha! What about appending the objective label to the filename? The filename’s already being stored in RadData, so this would be a super low-impact way of associating the data with the file directly.