Research Data Management

Managing Image Data

The growth of research image collection across the sciences, coupled with increasingly powerful instruments and devices for image capture, have created challenges and new opportunities for managing images across the research data lifecycle. Images can be collected in a number of different ways, such as in-house scanning or photography, digital creation, or purchased from outside sources.

Just like any data gathering process, for collection methods to be successful, researchers should make a plan for:

• collecting images
• capturing images
• analyzing images
• storing images

Preferred file formats for image data

• Moving images: MOV, MPEG, AVI, MXF
• Still images: TIFF, JPEG 2000, PDF, PNG, GIF, BMP

Imaging Cores

Research Core Facilities Program enables researchers at UC Davis to have access to state-of-the-art technology for their scientific research, including imaging equipment.

Research Imaging Tools

• Adobe Bridge is free software for locally organizing images. Bridge is a powerful creative asset manager that lets you preview, organize, edit and publish multiple creative assets quickly and easily.
• ImageJ is a free open-source, Java-based image processing and display tool. It can read and write images in GIF, JPEG, BMP, PNG, PGM, FITS, ASCII and TIFF formats.
• Tropy is a free and open-source software that allows you to organize, manage and describe photographs of research materials. Tropy shortens the path from finding archival sources to writing about them.