First, the frustration: I downloaded a torrent, available on several 
sites, of "46,000 oil paintings of Western Masters".   All well and 
good, except...

It's basically a site rip of http://www.classicartpaintings.com/
...which is broadly sorted into three categories:  artist sorted by 
FIRST NAME, artist clumped vaguely by country (not very accurately, if 
you actually look them up), and 'miscellaneous'.  But many had, nicely, 
(born-died) as part of the folder/file name.  So I decided to add that 
info to as much of what's in the collection and what I already had as 
possible, while organizing everything consistently

(Distraction!)
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2346905,00.asp

by artist family name and entering all the data in a spreadsheet, since 
it's a bit unwieldy just grouped by alpha, so I'll see if it's practical 
to also arrange by country of origin or time period or...wait...time 
period?  Art style!  Oh great.  Now I have to look up everything I'd 
already entered...and I need to make sure there aren't any duplicates 
images...so I've barely even scratched the surface of this undertaking. 
  Especially since I've only got the artist-by-name section organised 
(but not fully indexed in my spreadsheet).

It turns out someone cleaned up the contents of the torrent, got rid of 
bad data (it had some garbled files) and some duplicates, dropping the 
total image count by 2,000, but I didn't find out until after I'd 
started my own cleaning, and I don't know how far they went with it.  If 
I ever finish this, I should torrent it myself.

I know the forensics team analysing my desktop isn't doing nearly as 
much, but they (assuming plurality) have over five times the data to 
look through and they aren't going to be spending as much time per day 
as I've been, lately... things look bad for me ever seeing those 
computers again, even in the best of circumstances.

--
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.freesitespace.net

Post a reply to this message