How many items can I keep track of in Panorama?

I have an art gallery and want to be able to keep track of 15,000 pieces of art…can panorama handle that? The 2nd question is can I store images of those 15,000 pieces? Or at least link them to images I put in Photos on my mac? Or even an Image folder of some type? Thanks so much for your help.

All of the above.

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15,000 should be no problem.

You can’t store the images themselves in Panorama, only links to the images. (There is no reason to waste memory on images, since you can search or sort them.)

You can definitely put the images in a folder.

If you want to link to images that are in Photos, you’ll have to determine the actual Finder location of each image. I don’t know if Photos makes that easy to find or not, perhaps someone else on here knows more about Photos (I don’t use Photos.)

Here is where you want to start to learn how to display images:

Photos puts the originals in a package in the Pictures folder, Photos Library.photoslibrary. It would probably be easier to make a separate folder for the photographs to be displayed than to try to figure out how Photos organizes them.

What’s worse: Photos puts the pictures in several subfolders in this package. While originals are hosted in 16 subfolders (0 - F) of the “originals” folder, edited and modified pictures are spread in similar subfolders of the “resources” folder (“derivatives” and “renders”).

And worse again: The photographs in all those subfolders don’t show their original file name. They are renamed and have cryptic names like “0A1D4079-C8A0-4810-B118-718CC13CD736.heic”.

So it is not really an usable option to refer to pictures inside the .photoslibrary.

If you want to keep track of a lot of pictures, put those pictures in one folder on your disk. PanX is able to get the complete file list of that folder — so you don’t have to enter the long list of file names manually —, and it is able to display the images in a display object in a form. In your case, PanoramaX will store 15,000 records containing the paths to the 15,000 pictures in this folder, and it works with the original file names of the pictures.

One way of organizing images is to put them together in a folder, possibly with subfolders for categorization. Put your Panorama database in the top level of the folder; the image folder’s root folder. Then as you link the records in the database with the images, you use a relative path.

That way, if you move the folder or make copies, the database goes along and all of the links continue to work. Wherever you have the image folder, you also have your entire data catalogue. It also eliminates hunts for the database if it’s somewhere else on your hard drive.

There’s an available Image Log in the database exchange that you can use or pick apart that may reduce the number of wheels you have to re-invent.

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Jim Cook is too modest – the Image Log is a database he created and donated to the exchange! :clap:

See this help page if you aren’t familiar with the exchange.

I’m certain that the Database Exchange is a valuable Panorama asset and will only become more so. We all need to look at it more often. There’s a lot of usable material there, as well as numerous learning sources.