That would be great, I’m hiking this weekend but will touch base on Monday!
Hey Justin,
I would like to jump in here.
We also store photos, audio and video notes along with our sightings, which dramatically increases the file size of the CT databases. We are not yet running into file size issues, but post-processing of the databases is little handy as opening, storing and other tasks take quite much time. Furthermore, when we export the data base to other formats, such as csv, the link to the media get lost.
Therefore I would like to come back to the idea of moving those media to separeate elements, and just store an id of the files in the database. Would that be possible?
I did not find any tutorial on how to do that but perhaps I missed it.
Any help is highly appreciated 
Thanks and all the best,
Oliver
http://ikai.uni-koeln.de
Hello all, Similar problem here. Photos are a form of data entry and database is incredibly bloated. I think storing photo id’s makes more sense but in the meantime, how can I shrink the size of my database (backing up the database, then deleting sightings from the current database isn’t doing anything to the database size).
Hi folks,
CyberTracker was built when taking photos were very rare and as such it does not scale well.
Some recommendations until this gets fixed:
- Export the data and images to another database as soon as they have been collected, then delete them from the database
- To reliably clear out all the data, first export the database (with no sighting/track data) to a CTX and then re-import it
- Avoid creating screens with large images – instead, put the image into an Element and use the “Element Image” control
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
-Justin
Thanks Justin for your quick help.
Just not to mix-up things, I am talking about photos stored as data base entries, not about photos used in apllicatation screens.
So, how do I export images properly from a CT database? I was looking for a reasonable way, but didn’t find any but exporting every single media file the manual way (as it is described also here: https://groups.google.com/a/smartconservationsoftware.org/g/community/c/ZF9ZnSTZSyI). This procedure quickly takes a couple of days if the number of media files is large.
Anyway, lets assume I backed-up all the media files before CT downloaded them from the smartphone into the database, so I have them inside the CT db and as separate media elements. Each of the original media files has a unique ID (given by the Cybertracker app). Are these IDs stored somewhere in the CT database, so I can link the external data with my sightings automatically?
Thanks and all the best,
Oliver
Hi Oliver,
Exporting photos requires you to export to CSV while having a column for the photo. The files are then exported to Documents\CyberTracker\ExportMedia and the filenames in the CSV then map to files in that folder.
Another option could be to keep your data in smaller chunks, e.g. by month.
Cheers,
-Justin
Justin, you made my day!
I just had to switch from “Name” to “Value” in the edit view form for the respective media entries, and Cybertracker exported the media files when exporting the query table to a comma separated file. That’s exactly what I was looking for.
Thank you so much!
One question remains, sometimes, perhaps if the size of an exported file is above 3 MB, the export stops with the error message "Data provider or other service returned an E_FAIL status ". I tried running Ct as administrator, but this did not help. Do you have an idea how to resolve this issue?
Hi Oliver,
There should not be an internal size limit like that, so it’s possible that your database contains some corruption.
Could you try exporting to a CTX and re-importing as a new file?
Thanks!
Hi Justin,
exporting the database from MDB to a CTX file did the trick.
I believe the export cured some other issues, as the database is now generally much faster. For instance, the export of media files now took about 5 seconds instead of 1 hour.
Thank you so much again!