Sharepoint for IMAGE STORAGE

Some thoughts on using sharepoint to store images. In the past, Scalability of the underlying sharepoint collections was a bit of a challenge. Recent versions of sharepoint (and the underlying SQL Server) seem to have addressed these somewhat. More and more companies are using Sharepoint to dump all their image content. If you are planning to do the same, the first few questions to ask include:

• Storage Requirements and Where to store the images?
• ‘Capture’ Required?
• Output Format?
• Image Viewer for Sharepoint?

Storage Requirements

Instead of using the SharePoint Database for storage, consider RBS (Remote BLOB Storage). This allows a significantly more scalable solution without tying up your core database

Scanning Images versus ‘Capturing’ Data

Do you simply want to store the IMAGE – or do you care about what is ON the image? i.e. – do you want to collect one or more pieces of data from that image – and store that data in your database ?If so, then you need a ‘Capturing’ tool – which is different from a scanning tool. Once you have the capture process defined, you can start storing the images in Sharepoint.

output format for images

Most tools will output a  PDF Image. There will be hidden text within the pdf – which allows the image to be searchable (based on the hidden text).

Need a viewer to view the images

Sharepoint does not have a built in viewer for images, so you will need to look for an add-on. A good Add-on should allow searching, annotation and handling of multiple images at the same time.

Summary

While Sharepoint was originally designed to share documents such as Word, Excel and MSOffice artifacts,  it has since evolved to handle much more. With the ability to store objects remotely, one can easily utilize Sharepoint for large volumes of image data. In addition, the image data can be ‘searchable’ to some degree based on the ‘capturing’ technology used.