A.D. Riddle, Author at BiblePlaces.com

Using PLBL with Picasa (Part 2)

(Post by A.D. Riddle)

This posting will focus on two ways that Picasa can help you deploy the Pictorial Library of Bible Lands in classroom teaching. (See our first post on “Using PLBL with Picasa” here.)

First, we will show you how to use Albums to create a presentation on-the-fly using photographs that are located in multiple folders. This could be helpful if you are short on time, and the topic you are teaching or studying (such as Paul’s missionary trips) involves places or events across the Pictorial Library. First, browse or search for the photographs(s) that you want to include in your presentation.

When you click once on the photograph, it will be “selected” and two things will happen: a blue frame will appear around the selected image as below,

Left image is selected and has a blue frame.

and a thumbnail of the thumbnail (is there a name for this?) will appear in the lower left window of Picasa, in an area called the selection tray.

Selection tray with three selected images.

You can select more than one image at a time from a single folder using Shift or Control/Command keys. To select photographs from another folder without losing your selections from previous folders, click the “green thumbtack” button to “hold” the items in the selection tray. The red circle will remove items from the selection tray.

Selection tray buttons.

Once you have selected all the photographs you want to use in your presentation, click the “blue book” button for “albums.” It will open a menu that allows you to select an existing “album” or create a new “album” where you want to send the photographs. The images will not actually be moved.

Rather, albums are like “Smart Playlists” (or Dynamic Folders); you can add or delete albums without touching the original images. They allow you to mix-and-match into a single folder a variety of photographs that are located in several folders. All of the images in the selection tray will be “sent” to the album that you choose or create.

Albums button menu.

Albums can be viewed by clicking on “Albums” at the top of the left-side browser.

Albums browser with an album for “Gates.”

With your photographs in an album, you can now arrange the order of the photographs by clicking-and-dragging the thumbnails in the main screen. Once you have the photographs in the sequence you want them, double-click the first photograph to go the “Edit Picture” screen. At the top is a Play button which will begin the slideshow presentation.

Play slideshow button.

Moving the cursor in slideshow view will cause a control bar to appear at the bottom. Here you can rotate a photo, zoom in, exit the slideshow, or make other adjustments.

Slideshow controls.

To return to the main screen from the “Edit Picture” screen, click the “Back to Library” button at top left.

Return to main screen button.

Second, we will show you how to use Picasa to create a Google Earth kmz file of locations containing image thumbnails. The secret to doing this is Geotags. Geotags are location coordinate information contained within the actual photograph. By clicking the blue “information” button in the Show/Hide Panels toolbar at the bottom right of the screen, you can view the photograph metadata. If a photograph is geotagged, the metadata will include a GPS Latitude and GPS latitude.

Show/Hide Panels buttons.

To geotag a photograph, click the red “balloon pin” button on the Show/Hide Panels toolbar. A window will expand on the right which looks just like Google Maps.

Places Panel.

Select the photograph(s) you want to geotag. (You can tag multiple photographs at the same time.)

Next, you need to find the location in the Google map. (Just like with Google Maps, you can switch to satellite view and zoom in/out.) There are a few ways to find the location. You can do this manually by dragging the screen with the cursor and using zoom controls, and then clicking the green “balloon pin” to drop it on the location. You can use the search bar under the map to enter the name of a location. The best method, though, since so many Pictorial Library places are archaeological sites, is to copy/paste the coordinates from the Pictorial Library’s Site Index into the search bar.

Once a photograph is geotagged, the thumbnail in the main screen will have a red “balloon pin” in the lower right corner.

Photograph with red “balloon pin” indicating

it has been geotagged.

To create a Google Earth kmz file, select the geotagged photographs you want to include. Again, you can use the selection tray as described above. For Windows computers only, go to Tools > Geotag > Export. This will create a kmz file from the photographs you selected. The kmz file can be opened in Google Earth or Google Maps, and it will contain yellow “pushpins” with thumbnail images of the photographs which have been geotagged to that location. (The kmz export feature is not available in the Mac version of Picasa. Instructions are here for accomplishing the same task.)

I can imagine this being useful, for example, if one is teaching on the life of Abraham. You can have “pushpins” at Haran, Shechem, Bethel, Hebron, etc. with thumbnails of Pictorial Library photographs. The kmz file can be distributed to students, or it might be used in classroom instruction. Perhaps a teacher might craft an exercise where students have to make a “map” of a biblical account using photos from the Pictorial Library.

This completes our series on “Using Pictorial Library of Bible Lands with Picasa.” Picasa can be a very helpful tool for locating and deploying the wealth of images in the library.

We close with a comment about the limitations of using the Pictorial Library only with Picasa (or similar applications). The photographs of the Pictorial Library come in pre-made PowerPoint presentations which contain the maps, abundant annotations in the Speaker’s Notes (see here and here), helpful labels, and have the photographs arranged in a logical order. Picasa misses out on all these features, so our recommendation is not to bypass the PowerPoints, but use Picasa in conjunction with them.

Tagged Techniques, Technology

Using PLBL with Picasa (Part 1)

(Post by A.D. Riddle)

In a previous post, we made mention of the 17,683 photographs that comprise the Pictorial Library of Bible Lands (PLBL). That is a lot of photographs! And it is a lot of places! To help the user find what they are looking for and to navigate the library, we added some brand-new features such as maps (here and here) and a Site Index, in addition to the already-helpful Image Index, the organization of the library into volumes/regions, and the descriptive filenames for every single photograph.

In this post, we would like to draw attention to a free program named Picasa, by Google. I have found this to be one of the most helpful tools for digging into the hidden corners of the Pictorial Library. Picasa works on both Windows and Mac computers.

Once you download and install Picasa, you can specify what folders you want Picasa to scan (or index). The index database is sort of like an address book—it does not make a duplicate copy of the images, rather it tells Picasa where to go look to find the images. NOTE: Picasa will work best if you have copied the Pictorial Library to your hard drive.

Under the File menu, select “Add Folder to Picasa…” Here you can specify which folders you want Picasa to see (i.e. scan or index) and which ones you want Picasa to ignore. The window looks like this:

Folder Manager window.

Once you have selected the folders you want Picasa to scan, it will begin to index the files. This could take quite some time since the Pictorial Library has lots of images, but Picasa has only to do it once.

In the lower right corner of your screen, a slide-out window like this will appear to notify you that Picasa is indexing the images:

Indexing slide-out window.

When Picasa has indexed the Pictorial Library, the main screen will look something like this:

On the left side, you see a tree diagram of all the folders Picasa has scanned/indexed, and in the main window, you see thumbnails of the photographs in the selected folder. Try double-clicking on one of the image thumbnails. (Once you do, a button will appear in the upper left corner with a blue arrow and the words “Back to Library.”)

At this stage, we can point out the first two benefits of using the Pictorial Library of Bible Lands with Picasa. First, you can quickly browse thumbnails of all the photographs in the entire Pictorial Library. Images will catch your eye that you may not have ever noticed before, or you may find yourself discovering whole portions of the library that were unknown.

Second, in the top right of the Picasa window is a search bar. Thankfully, every single photograph in the Pictorial Library has been given a descriptive filename. When you type in places or other terms, the search engine will look for image filenames and folder names to isolate the relevant photographs—all at Google speed! You can search for a placename, a type of construction (e.g. gate), an object (e.g. lamp), an event (e.g. winnow), and so forth. The search bar looks like this:

Search bar.

Here are the search results for “gate.” You can see on the left side which volumes and folders have images of gates, and in the main window, you can scroll through the thumbnails.

We will discuss one other feature of Picasa in this post. When you search for a name or term in Picasa, the program is not only looking at filenames and folder names, but also “tags.” In a previous post about the Pictorial Library‘s Site Index, we highlighted that index’s usefulness because it allows you to find alternate names for a site that might not have been used in the image filename. The example we used was Ptolemais (Acts 21:7), which does not appear in the image filenames (Acco does instead). Well, all of the names from the Site Index have been added to the photographs as tags, so that in Picasa, you can perform a search for Ptolemais (or Akko or Acre or any of the other names or spellings) and all the photographs of Acco will appear. This makes it quick and easy to find places, even if you are using a different name or spelling!

In the lower right corner there is a row of four buttons that looks like this:

Show/Hide Panel buttons.

The third button has a cream-colored “shipping tag” icon. Clicking on it will reveal all the tags that have been added to a photograph. The Acco photographs have been given the following tags:

Tags panel.

Of course, Picasa is not the only program that can be used to browse and search the Pictorial Library.
Other such programs include Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, iPhoto (for Mac), and ACDSee Pro, as well as perhaps some lesser-known ones such as ShotWell, XnView, FastStone Image Viewer. And there are others.

In a future post, we will highlight two more features of Picasa that make it such an excellent tool for use with the Pictorial Library of Bible Lands. Of course, there is so much more that can be done with Picasa, but we leave that for you to explore and discover.

[Click here for Part 2]

Tagged Techniques, Technology

Lecture at Northwestern University

(Post by A.D. Riddle)

On Wednesday, May 7, at 7:00pm, Karen Radner will give a lecture entitled “Brain Drain: Foreign Experts in the Heartland of the Assyrian Empire.” The lecture will take place at Guild Lounge, Scott Hall, Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.

A description of the lecture given in March reads as follows:

The Neo-Assyrian Empire (9th–7th century BC) routinely used deportations as a key tool of establishing and maintaining control over its holdings. But deportation was by no means a blanket strategy, as the deported population groups were carefully selected to include craftsmen and specialists. Most of them were relocated in the Assyrian Heartland (today North Iraq) which was developed into the unrivalled economic and cultural centre of the Middle East. My paper which will focus on the “brain drain” experienced by the peripheries of the Assyrian Empire, including regions such as Egypt and Iran.

The lecture is free and open to the public. A reception is to follow. More information is here.

Karen Radner has written a number of essays and articles that are helpful for understanding the history of the Neo-Assyrian period, especially the centuries when Assyria came into direct contact with Israel and Judah. (In fact, the Bible mentions by name all Assyrian kings from Tiglath-pileser III through Ashurbanipal.) Radner was part of the team that created “Assyrian Empire Builders” and many of her articles are available through her Academia.edu page, including

“Assyrians and Urartians”
“The Assur-Nineveh-Arbela Triangle: Central Assyria in the Neo-Assyrian Period”
“After Eltekeh: Royal Hostages from Egypt at the Assyrian Court”
“Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Musasir, Kumme, Ukku and Šubria – the Buffer States between Assyria and Urartu”
“Assyria and the Medes”

Pictorial Library of Bible Lands New Features: Site Index

(Post by A.D. Riddle)

In May of 2012, a major revision of the Pictorial Library of Bible Lands was announced on this blog.
It was a significant moment in the life of BiblePlaces.com, and the culmination of years of work. The number of volumes increased from 10 to 18, and the number of total photographs increased from 5,854 to 17,683. Apart from these statistics, however, many other improvements were made and some brand-new features were added, all of which make the collection more user-friendly.

We have already described the maps which debuted in the revision of the Pictorial Library (see part 1 and part 2). In this post, we want to highlight another brand-new feature: the Site Index.

The Site Index is a pdf document which provides (1) the primary name for each site that is used in the image filenames, (2) the volume and region where the site is located in the Pictorial Library, (3) a list of alternate names and spellings for the site, and (4) latitude and longitude coordinates for the site.

The importance and usefulness of this new feature can best be illustrated with some examples.

Perhaps you are teaching or studying Acts 21, and you need some photographs of Ptolemais (Acts 21:7), but you do not find any images with Ptolemais in the filename. With the Site Index you can quickly find Ptolemais, and see that it is found on Volume 1: “Galilee and the North”, in the folder/PowerPoint “Plain of Asher.” The Old Testament name of the city is Acco, and that is the name used for all of the image filenames. You will also see other historical names for the site such as Tell el-Fukhkhar and Acre, which might become important for doing further research. (In a future post about Google’s free program Picasa, we will mention another very easy way to find sites by other names, such as Ptolemais.)

Entry for Acco/Ptolemais in the Pictorial Library Site Index.

Another example concerns placenames which are shared by more than one site. For example, the Pictorial Library contains photographs of two sites in Israel named Achzib, one located on the Plain of Asher and the other in the Judean Shephelah (foothills).

Entries for Achzib in the Pictorial Library Site Index.

Similarly, there are two sites in the Pictorial Library named Apollonia, one in Greece (Acts 17:1) and the other in Israel. The Site Index can help the user sort out these kinds of things, and make sure you are looking at the right site.

Entries for Apollonia in the Pictorial Library Site Index.

Finally, the coordinates for the site can be copied and pasted (simply, without any need to format or edit them) into a map program, such as Google Maps or Google Earth, so you can find where the site is located. (We will return to this last topic in a future post about using the Pictorial Library with Picasa.)

Note: The Site Index is a distinct document from the Image Index, both of which are included in the Pictorial Library of Bible Lands.

Pictorial Library New Features: Maps (Part 2)

(Post by A.D. Riddle)

Two days ago, we highlighted the brand-new maps which are included in the revised Pictorial Library of Bible Lands. Today, we will illustrate some of the steps involved in creating the maps.

The key to making a map is layers. One layer contains all the dots and names of sites; another layer includes rivers and wadis; the terrain is yet another layer; and so forth. Each of these layers of data has first to be created or obtained from somewhere, and then they are compiled into a map.

The base maps are created from a DEM, or digital elevation model. A DEM is like a digital photograph from your camera, except each pixel records an elevation. (In this case, the DEMs come from NASA.) From this one DEM, two separate images are generated: one image which shows a continuous color gradation from dark-to-light (showing elevation change), and a second image which shows “hillshading,” that is, the shadows that would be cast if the sun were in a particular position.

DEM of the Balkan Peninsula with elevation shown as

a continuous progression from dark to light colors.

Hillshading effect applied to the DEM of the Balkan Peninsula.

The first image was colorized according to the scheme used for the Pictorial Library maps. Then, the sea was colored blue.

Grayscale hypsometric tint replaced with color hypsometric tint.

Colorized sea with coastal “glow.”

Finally, these two images were blended into one image to complete the base map.

Hypsometric tint and Hillshade blended.

After the base map is completed, it remains to add all the streams, lakes, sites, and other lines and dots that make up the map. The linework and dots began by looking like this.

Linework and dots to be added to the map.

Linework and dots overlaid on the base map.

The final step is to “clean up” all the lines and dots and add name labels. The linework is given the right colors, widths and sizes, and any unnecessary elements are removed. The final map comes out like this.

The Jerusalem maps are special. The base map that was used comes from the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem, by Sir Charles Wilson. The map was scanned, and then colorized by Bill Schlegel. We added the pools, lines and labels.

The Missing Map

As a final note, when the revised Pictorial Library of Bible Lands was first released, we were not able to include a map of the island of Patmos, because the resolution of the NASA data was too coarse–the island is simply too small. Here is what it would have looked like.

Ugly map of Patmos (not in PLBL) using NASA SRTM data.

Pixel resolution is 3-arc seconds, i.e. each pixel covers an area 90 meters by 90 meters.

Since then, we have obtained higher resolution DEMs from NASA (via the Oriental Institute’s CAMEL Lab). The resultant map looks much better and now is fit to be included in the PowerPoint for Patmos, in Volume 12 “The Greek Islands” of the Pictorial Library.

Handsome map of Patmos using NASA ASTER GDEM data.

Pixel resolution is 30 meters.

In our next post, we will highlight another brand-new feature which was added in the revised edition of Pictorial Library of Bible Lands. As with the maps, it makes the thousands of photographs in the collection more accessible and enhances their usability.

Pictorial Library New Features: Maps (Part 1)

(Post by A.D. Riddle)

The Pictorial Library of Bible Lands is an extensive collection of high-resolution photographs. The photos come two ways: in folders of jpeg images and in pre-made PowerPoint presentations. With the massive revision of the collection some brand new features were included which were not in previous versions, and I would like to highlight two of them. The first of these new features is maps which are included in each PowerPoint presentation.

A total of 43 maps were created for the revision of the Pictorial Library of Bible Lands. There are altogether 383 PowerPoint presentations among the 18 volumes of the Pictorial Library, and about 77% of these contain maps. (The exceptions are volume 15—no map was made of the city of Rome—and volumes 16, 17, and 18, which do not lend themselves to mapping.)

The Pictorial Library contains all the familiar sites, but it also has many biblical and historic sites that are not as well known. The maps are provided to help the user find where a site is located, without having to consult a separate source. Virtually every site and geographic feature which appear in the Library‘s photographs are marked on the maps. This results in maps with a mixture of both modern place names and ancient ones. The places which appear in any given PowerPoint are marked by a red star on the map(s) next to the name so that users can quickly locate that particular site or feature.

The maps use two color schemes to encode information: one scheme for hypsometry and one scheme for labels. First, lower elevations are colored green, intermediate and higher elevations are colored various shades of brown, and the highest elevations are colored white. This is called hypsometric tint, where the change in color represents change in elevation. Green does not necessarily represent areas with vegetation, brown does not necessarily represent arid regions, and white does not necessarily represent snow.

Second, the labels and linework also have a color scheme. The white labels are used for cultural features, that is, features which have been created by human beings, such as settlements, tumuli, or temples. Yellow labels and lines indicate routes, either natural or man-made; green labels indicate geographical features (plains, valleys, mountains); and blue labels indicate water features (rivers, lakes, springs). The yellow dots indicate cities, springs, or other sites such as aqueducts or tumuli.

One thing that cartographers have to consider is changes in coastlines and lakes over time. Will the map represent a historical state, the modern one, or perhaps a mixture of both? The maps in the Pictorial Library of Bible Lands show the modern coastline and the modern Sea of Galilee and Lake Huleh. But the shape of the Dead Sea, as with the majority of maps of Bible lands, dates to 1975 and before. If we had used the modern shape of the lake, only the northern basin would be blue, because today the southern basin is dry due to lowering of the lake level.

The maps are an important new feature in the Pictorial Library of Bible Lands and are one of the ways in which we have tried to make the collection more user-friendly. In a follow-up post, we will describe some of the steps in the map-making process.

Galilee map, PLBL vol. 1.

[Click here for Part 2]