[ome-users] Standard format for naming images

[John Oreopoulos]

I have a question that I think members of this community might be able to answer.

My situation is this: I'm using OME to act as a database for image data captured on several similar instruments (spinning disk conficals in this case). Specifically, I'm storing images that test the quality and imaging performance of the instruments, like multi -channel PSF data, illumination uniformity, etc.

There's a lot of different parameter space to fully capture all if the information I desire for each instrument ie: many combinations of lasers, filters, dichroic etc.

I'm wondering what the best way to go about naming each image. Certainly the image meta data contains all of the important information which captures the full state of the system when an image is captured for a particular test, but I would like to have a way of identifying that state from the image name. Traditionally what we've been doing is listing all the relevant parameters in the image name itself (eg: 488nm-dichroic1-filter5 or something like that). But sometimes these image names become too long and everyone in my workplace has a different way of naming that can make it difficult to track down a particular image from its name.

This sounds like a problem that the high throughput microscopy community may have already dealt with or solved. If anyone out there has some thoughts on this that they could share I would appreciate it!

John Oreopoulos