20050626: Synced aircraft images

Hi Steve,
Don Murray forwarded me your email.

> Is there any documentation available that lays out the catalog and/or  
> requirements to display synched digital imagery ala what you showed at  
> the EOL retreat? I have more than a few scientists who would be  
> interested in doing that for the ACME flights that occurred in 2004.  
> Right now all the individual imagery files are in big tarballs designed  
> for ftp delivery and subsequent burning to CD. It would be great if  
> they could access and analyze all this information via IDV.
>  
There is no documentation available though the format is pretty straight 
forward.
The image catalog is xml that looks like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<images  group="Rico Flight" name="2005-01-19 19" format="yyyyMMddHHmmss">
<image time="20050119195900"  file="c130_fwd_050119_195900.jpg"/>
<image time="20050119195800"  file="c130_fwd_050119_195800.jpg"/>
...
</images>

If the file attribute is not an absolute path then it is considered to 
be relative to where the
xml file is. This can be on the file system or on a web server.

The format attribute defines the format of the time attribute in each 
image tag.

You just need to select the images.xml file in the File Chooser.  Under
Data Source Type choose "Image Movie Index". The image movie display control
will be automatically created.

There is also a xml catalog that catalogs a collection of these image 
sets. This is what we use
for our default WebCam display. Right now there is no easy way to load 
one of these
catalog of catalogs in.


At one time we experimented with just pointing to a directory of images 
and extracting out
the date time from the file names, thus obviating the need for the 
catalog. This facility has since
gotten lost but perhaps we should resurrect it.

As always, we welcome feedback on these (and any IDV) features.

-Jeff