Tuesday, April 22, 2008

ARTstor woes

I hope to share some useful information to other frustrated ARTstor users. Unfortunately again, one student left before I could tell her the answer to her ARTstor question. ARTstor is just a frustrating database in all ways. Some of this is unavoidable since it is images rather than textual information.

Problem: We have been having issues with saving ARTstor images in Internet Explorer 7. It was saving the file in an unrecognizable format, but worked fine using Firefox. I finally wrote to their technical support yesterday and have to say I was very impressed with how quickly they responded.

Answer: you either cannot change the file name or you need to add .jpg to the end of the new file name so that the computer recognizes it as a JPEG. Of course I don't find this entirely reasonable, but at least we can be helpful to students who ask now.

Problem: The question the student asked about was how to print just the thumbnails of a group of images instead of printing out 12 separate full-sized images.

Answer: If the images are in a group, you can go up to View in the toolbar and select Image group print preview, then select how much text information you want to appear with it. The tools in ARTstor don't play well with pop-up blockers, so you will likely have to hold the Ctrl key down while you click on this, and you may have to do this several times before a new window will open up with the images lined up down one side and text on the other. You can then use the Print option under File if your toolbar appears, or Ctrl+P if it doesn't appear (the Ctrl+P command does not work in ARTstor until you get to this page).

There is also some way to print just the images and to put up to 16 thumbnails on one sheet, but I can't figure that one out yet.


The student had left her stuff at a computer to go ask someone else for help, so I went into the back to figure it out, and came out a few minutes later to give her more information and she was gone. I hate letting students think that's the best I could do, but I did not tell her to hold on and I would try to figure it out. So this time it is my fault.

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