INTRODUCTION

ABCD is A Better CD Designer. The idea grew out of a frustration with trying to organize a snowballing backlog of digital photos so that photos could be both accessible for my own use and easily shared with others.

Most photo organizers keep photos by file names. Some better ones associate them with keywords, which is better, but still depends on choosing lots and lots of keywords without getting lost in them all.

An earlier design for ABCD actually used a database to store lots of facts about each photo: who, what, where, when, why, and how. This way a simple application could find photos fitting any reasonable criteria. This design had potential, but has one big drawback: it is hard to share photos with people who are not running the same database.

ABCD solves this problem by creating a directory tree and storing photos in it. Each photo can be stored in multiple places in the directory tree. For instance, a picture of my son with his grandmother from Christmas 2005 could be accessed through paths 2005/Christmas, Families/RYoung/Aaron, Families/Young/Mary, and any other categories it might belong in. The tree is used to generate HTML code, which can be viewed by any browser.

ABCD consists of 3 pieces. At the core is the XML database, which stores the photo information. Photo information includes the directory tree and all the files and references associated with it, along with optional data attached to all of them. The front-end editor is used to create and edit a database, and the back-end HTML generator uses HTML template files to translate the database into HTML code.

ABCD was designed with the following goals:

• provide a relatively simple design for storing photos with associated data. Make sure photos are easy to locate.
• store data in a standard, (relatively) human-readable form, so other applications can edit and access it
• make it easy to combine smaller databases into a larger one that will fill a DVD
• be expandable to provide custom handling for other types of files besides just photos (mp3, avi, doc, etc.)
• have a very flexible way to generate HTML code from the database, so that the same database can be used to output a CD, website, or any other desirable format, and accessed by people without any special software

The goals were addressed as follows:

• provide a relatively simple design for storing photos with associated data. Make sure photos are easy to locate.
  Folder tree paradigm familiar to all computer users. Photos are stored just once but can be accessed in multiple locations in the folder tree, making locating a particular photo simple.
• store data in a standard, (relatively) human-readable form, so other applications can edit and access it
  Data stored in an XML database, so it can be edited by hand, or other applications can easily be written to use the same database.
• make it easy to combine smaller databases into a larger one that will fill a DVD
  Merge function and drag-and-drop interface to combine and edit databases.
• be expandable to provide custom handling for other types of files besides just photos (mp3, avi, doc, etc.)
  Written in OO Java, with Item object expandable to different file types
• have a very flexible way to generate HTML code from the database, so that the same database can be used to output a CD, website, or any other desirable format, and accessed by people without any special software
  Output controlled by HTML template files, a combination of standard HTML code and tags written in the IC scripting language

REQUIREMENTS

SAMPLE OUTPUT

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