Simple image database recommendations

[John Oreopoulos]

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Dear listserver,

I'd like to start building a simple image database at my workplace for keeping track of images sent into me from various customers. While I would very much like to use the Open Microscope Environment (OME), unfortunately I do not have the funds or the resources to setup OME over here. Therefore, I'm wondering if any of you can recommend something similar to OME, but simpler, and maybe even cloud-based. Maybe something like flickr or Picasa for freely uploading microscope images, tagging them for easy retrieval, and viewing on any internet browser. I would greatly appreciate if any of you could share some ideas on this topic.

Thanks,

John Oreopoulos
Staff Scientist
Spectral Applied Research Inc.
A Division of Andor Technology
Richmond Hill, Ontario
Canada
www.spectral.ca

[Pariksheet Nanda]

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Hi John,

I imagine the challenges here are the size of the datasets.  If you
want to err on keeping the data private, most online services would
limit you to some size.

> I would very much like to use the Open Microscope Environment (OME)

Good!  I don't see how resources are a concern since you're already
storing the data somewhere, presumably in your computer, and OMERO can
also be installed on your computer since it supports all operating
systems.  If you want your OMERO server to be accessible on the
internet, you can use a dynamic DNS service
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_DNS).  If you want your
computer to be accessible on your intranet, many routers can be
configured to map a static IP address to the mac address of the
computer which should take care of that sharing problem.  If you need
to setup a public internet server. that's hard at companies because of
security concerns, but it's straight forward to setup any regular home
computer to act as the server with dyn DNS and configure your router
to forward the port.  Port 443 is always a good port to expose since
no company would ever block it since SSL uses it.  The OMERO user
mailing list would be a good place to get help on the sys admin
documentation (http://www.openmicroscopy.org/site/support/omero5/sysadmins/index.html)
if you need it, and feel free to contact me off-list if you need more
advice on the networking side.

Pariksheet

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Pariksheet Nanda
University of Connecticut
Graduate Student