Author: Christoph Bartneck

New LEGO Minifigure Catalogs

I am proud to announce the availability of three new Minifigure Catalogs. The books are available from CreateSpace, Amazon and as a eBooks from Lulu. I am in particular happy to be able to offer the 2011 Minifigures as a new companion book. You do not need to purchase another big book, but you can simply update you reference with this series of annual catalogs. The Harry Potter and Star Wars catalogs are specifically targeted to collectors that focus their collections and who have no need for a complete overview.

The three new catalogs use a new and improved design that shows multiple photographs and the associated meta data right next to each other. A price guide will offer you insights into the rarity of the Minifigures.

The App will also soon be updated to include the 2011 Minifigures. Stay tuned.

Importing matching images in Filemaker

I wasted a whole week on a Filemaker problem when trying to re-import images. In my database, I had several thousand images as links to the original files. The images were in JPG and now I wanted to replace them with PSD versions that were located at the exact same location on the hard disk. For each image I had meta information that I did not want to loose. I created a new field called “path_correct” in which I substituted “jpg” with “psd” from the image path field to get an accurate match with the PSD files. You can also get the path by using the GetAsText function on the image container.

In theory, you could import the folder that contains all the PSD images and select “import matching records” and use the path_correct field as the matching field. What happened during the import was very confusing at first. If, for example, I had four images in a sub folder, then all those four images would receive data from only the last image in the folder.

The problem is that although the field “path” or my “path_corrected” shows that whole path, including the file name,

file://hardDisk/Users/bartneck/Documents/photos/minifigure-01165/minifigure-01165-01.psd

the matching worked only up to the folder level, excluding the image  file name, in this case minifigure-01165-01.psd. During the import, Filemaker found several matches in the database for

file://hardDisk/Users/bartneck/Documents/photos/minifigure-01165/

and imported the data into all matching records. This is a true bug with Filemaker. The path field shows the path including the file name, but during import only the path excluding the file name is being considered. This is also not documented at all.

The solution is to use both the path and the filename field as matching fields for the import. Then each image in the database has a unique identifier that matches the images on the hard disk. I hope that this post helps others to avoid the same problem.