All Media

540,350

Which database fields are searched

Media items (whether images, PDF files, word-processiong files, web pages, recording, videos, etc.) saved within this application are listed in a database table that describes the media item and points to its file. They are organized into "Collections" by their content rather than by the file format. This search focuses on the "histories" collection and selects items if the search string is found in one of these three database fields:

1. Title. Titles are hyperlinked at the top of the Description column in the results table below.
2. Description. Longer than the title, but usually no more than a few lines long.
3. BodyText. This can be an arbitrarily large block of text with rich formatting (i.e headings, lists, borders, backgrounds, colors, hyperlinks, etc). The bodytext sometimes just adds a bit more information beyond the description and and sometimes it is virtually a full web page. But most media items do not have a bodytext value, ,
   (The bodytext is not shown on this page. You can see it only if you view the media item by clicking on the image thumbnail or hyperlinked title.)

425,265

What's in the 'Gallery'

The Gallery shows just thumbnail images; no descriptive text to identify media items. It may be useful only for photos. Significantly, media items without thumbnails do not appear in the Gallery.

Media items that are not likely to have thumbnails include

1. Non-images such as Word documents, PDF's, HTML pages, etc.
2. Images that were scanned from books and other documents. In truth, it wouldn't be hard to generate thumbnails for those images, and some do have thumbnails, but it isn't generally worthwhile to do so, since thumbnails of scanned documents are usually too small to reveal anything useful about the document.

520,400

Media 'Collection'

This site uses thousands of media files including many types of images and documents. To facilitate various aspects of file management, they are are broken out into what might be called a functional categorization the we refer to as "Collection". Some (not necessarily all) of the active collections are:

1. Photos - Most photographs of people, places, and things.
2. Histories - Stories and other narratives that are not primarily focused on data.
3. Censuses - Images of census worksheets from national and state censuses and other similar accountings of the people in a given place at a given time.
4. Documents - All other representations of formal documents such as marriage, birth, death, military draft, naturizalization, and graduation certificates; church and town birth, marriage, and burial registers; city directories etc., etc., etc.
5. Headstones - Photos, maps, and documents tied to an application feature that focuses on finding graves and headstones within cemeteries.

Clearly, many, files could be logically be assigned to different collections, and other potentially-useful collections come fairly easily to mind. But these functional collections are much more useful than a breakdown based on less ambiguous file formats.