Some features apply only to the New Gallery (from Sept 2005)

Gallery Database

The photo details in the gallery database are extracted from the Race Results database - which in turn depends on the details supplied on the entry forms or online entry.

Unfortunately, the data supplied for some boats is not always consistent across a range of events.

Sometimes a boat name is spelt differently on entry forms for different events and in the case of shared ownership of a boat the owner names sometimes vary across events.

Boat Type information is sometimes specified differently by different owners for the same boat type.


The photo details are gathered into a collection of keywords for each photo and these are checked for a match with your entry in the Search Box. Most of the time search yields accurate results, however now and then, due to the problems outlined above a search can be problematic.

Keywords

When a photo is indexed, the keywords are listed under its large photo.
A photo's Keywords depend on the kind of boat in the photo and fall broadly into 3 formats ...

Boat TypeKeywords
Cruisers & Keelboats :Sail No, Boat Name, Owner Name, Boat Type, Class
Dinghies - Helm only :Sail No, Helm Name, Boat Type, Class
Dinghies - Helm & Crew :Sail No, Helm Name, Crew Name, Boat Type, Class

The picture reference number is also included.
For some events the club name is included.

Doing a Search

Search is NOT case sensitive.
 
Sail Number Search
Use only the numeric part of a sail number.
This is more reliable than a word search.
The only problem is where duplicate sail numbers result in more photos than those sought.
 
Boat Name Search
For boat names of more than one word, all words can be entered or you can try entering one of the words.

For some boat names, such as X-Ten or Yon-Ka etc its safer to only enter PART of the word, such as "ten" or say "yon" in these examples. However, if they are consistently spelt in the keywords - and your spelling is the same - then the full word is ok.
 
Owner Name or Helm Name or Crew Name Search
Its safest to enter just one word for people names, just the second name.

Two or more word searches can be problematic as a successful search requires that ALL the search words entered exist in a keyword selection PRECISELY as you have spelled them.

If you enter say Joe Bloggs, a match is found if BOTH words, "joe" AND "bloggs" are found. However, if the name in the keywords is Joseph Bloggs, a match would not be found if you enter Joe Bloggs.

At times entering one word or part of a word may result in additional photos you dont want, but at least you can be sure that the selection includes the ones you want.
 
Boat Type Search
Once again its safer to enter just one word. For instance if you enter Beneteau you will get matches for all the Beneteau models.

Occasionally the boat type includes a dash, ie X-332. Dont bother typing the dash, as its ignored in the search, leave a space instead. For instance ...
if you enter X 332, then matches are found for X332, X-332 and of course X 332
whereas if you enter X332 then only matches for X332 are found.

Where dashes are involved its safer to do 2 searches, one for say X 332 and the other for X332.
 
Photo Ref Number Search
At times you may wish to view a photo and you know its photo Ref Number, for example AB0006.

Comment

I used the 'Keywords' approach for search matching to make life easier for you. I wanted to avoid having you select a category of item to be searched, ie select whether its a sail no or boat name or boat type etc. However, even if I did that, the fact that the data is at times inconsistent in the database would still result in problematic searches on some items.

Actually, for a few reasons, I look at the sail number field itself rather than the keywords when you enter a sail number. This presents a problem if one is searching for boat types which happen to be numeric, such as the 1720 or 420 etc. I've decided to live with this - its a trade off to keep the search procedure simple.