ISO FileMaker Magazine

Just because you can click the Create button to add a new container field doesn't mean you should do it. In fact, you might want to consider never adding a single container field to your main solution's tables. "Really?", you ask. Yes, because there are many advantages to segmenting a solution into multiple distinct parts. Most media, images, video and audio, is considered "heavy data" and that data comes with a big cost.

It may be that you're unfamiliar with how you can best structure your data within FileMaker. With images, you're often better served by handling that data in a very specific and dedicated way. This video, and the associated technique file, shows you how to approach the situation of handling images. It also addresses the display of those images. For the sake of images, you certainly need to see the image for the value it provides. However, you rarely need to transfer the full image which was captured or imported.

Watch this video in order to gain a full understanding of how it may be best to both store and view your images within a FileMaker solution.

With a handful of simple scripts and just a few fields, you can easily accomplish some powerful image organization both inside and outside of FileMaker. In this video, we take a look at how FileMaker can be used to organize a collection of images. This is prior to sending them out or making them available for a web server to host them.

If your FileMaker solution needs to work with images used for verification or any form of media communication, then learning how you can make FileMaker bend to your media will can have a number of big benefits.

Need to know how to manage the whole process and create an optimized approach to capturing and managing a digital collection of assets across a large number of users? We'll address that issue too!

Learning from a technology you don't already understand, while receiving an immediate benefit, is one of my driving reasons for creating content. In this two part series, I dig into the depths of understanding the JavaScript mechanisms natively available to FileMaker developers and learners.

This first video focuses on the implementation of an internal cropping tool which uses a web viewer to provide the interaction and actual cropping. The demo file and video show you how to implement the JS libraries required and how to use the technology available.

Understanding how to crop, and also the distinction of what you want to crop versus what you need to crop, is an important step for some high impact database systems which may use larger sized images. If you're looking for a better understanding of JavaScript and also how to crop and image directly within FileMaker then I'm sure these videos will cover what you need to know.

When it comes to solving problems within FileMaker, there's nothing quite so satisfying as visually seeing the result of a cool technique. Especially if it includes a picture of yourself!

Ok, vanity aside, this video and its technique file are just such a solution I had an immediate need, and put the technique to the test. It was all about collecting a variety of images from all kinds of different sources and making their presentation unified. Images were emailed to me which came from cell phones, high quality DSLR cameras and more.

I needed to manipulate theses images by cropping them to a specific size and storing them in an optimized fashion.

Limited to only native FileMaker functionality, this is a hard thing to do. You can't drag and image around to position, you can't choose the starting point and how much of an image to crop. You also can't zoom in or out in order to achieve the ideal size.

You can, however, do all these things with the tools FileMaker provides plus a little help from either a plugin or server side installed library.

This video will walk you through all the parts and pieces in order to understand how to both implement and use some pretty cool tech for cropping images right within FileMaker!

Just like fashion, there are certain technologies which often cycle around and find new life in our modern tech world. A great example are animated gifs. And speaking of making the rounds, don't forget about the 20 plus year old tech of HTML Image Maps.

Since FileMaker Pro has integrated Web Viewers and with the addition of FileMaker's fmp:// url, we've long been able to integrate images with irregularly shaped areas offering any number of polygonal objects which are user clickable.

If you deal with any kind of map, seating chart, irregular shaped real-world object which requires specific defined areas, then look no further than HTML Image Maps. No Flash required here.

The biggest issue with using this straight forward tech is the time it takes to generate the defined object regions. That is, unless you know how to use the right software which makes the process a breeze. The rest is integrating into your FileMaker layout.

Using OmniGraffle to generate clickable HTML image maps, you can quickly and seamlessly integrate this old, but reliable, technology within your own FileMaker solutions. Need to make that company blueprint of all the corporate meeting rooms a clickable map? Look no further than this video. It has pretty much everything you need!