I have a photographic archive with over 150,000 digital images in several file formats. Over the years I have used Lotus 123 and then Excel to create catalogues for groups of these images. The images themselves are arranged alphabetically by country and then alphabetically by city or site and then by location within the site. There has never been a single universal catalogue for the entire archive, but only country by country and not all in the same spreadsheet layout. The images are identified by camera generated numbers that repeat after 10,000, so suffixes or prefixes (such as a numerically expressed date) are used to arrive at a unique number. In the spreadsheets that are most completely elaborated there are fields (columns) for things like work date; attribution of artist, architect, patron; view description; "other information" that might explain iconography or other important features of the image; copyright owner (me); and so on. Not all of the spreadsheets are fully elaborated.

We are in the process of revising the spreadsheets so that they are identical in layout, that is so that the columns with the various types of data are arranged in the same sequence with the same column width for each of the various columns (whose width is variable depending on the type of data contained in the different columns). We are doing this to facilitate the merger of all of the spreadsheets into one universal sheet for the entire archive.

The ultimate goal is to arrive at a searchable database that could display the images.

In the past I have been told that Excel can not store image files in cells. The size of the digital image files varies, the earliest digital photographs are relatively small files, current digital image files can be greater than 50 mb. The total archive takes up about 12 terabytes.

I would like to be able to have all of these images catalogued in an Excel sheet that could link to the images or contain the images for display on demand by query, if possible.

Is this something that your software can enable?

Many thanks for your kind reply.

James B. Kiracofe