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Managing image servers

Arkindex splits IIIF URLs into an image server and an image component to make managing changes across a large set of images easier. The safest way to edit existing image servers, and apply changes across all of their images, is to use the administration interface.

The administration interface allows editing attributes on an image server just like any other object, but additional tools are provided to help with specific changes in the URLs.

Splitting

When viewing the details of an image server in the administration interface, a Split action is available in the top-right corner. This opens a form that requests a specific path to be typed in to select which directory to split on. Splitting will create a new image server with the new directory in the URL and will move the images over to this server.

For example, splitting a server at https://example.org/iiif with the folder folder will result in a new image server at https://example.org/iiif/folder. All images of the original server that had a path starting in folder/ will be moved to this new server, and their paths will be updated to remove this prefix. Other images will not be affected.

Attempting to split a server by a folder that is not found in any image will cause an error. If there are no images to move, you can create an image server instead.

Merging

When viewing the details of an image server in the administration interface, a Merge action is available in the top-right corner. This opens a form to select another image server to merge this server with. Merging a server will cause this server to be deleted, and all images from this server to be transferred to the destination server.

Both servers must have the same scheme (http:// or https://) and the same domain name.

One of the two servers must “contain” the other. For example, https://example.org/iiif/folder can be merged into https://example.org/iiif, but not into https://example.org/iiif/other_folder.

When merging a server into a “child” server, all images of the source server must start with the destination server’s prefix. For example, merging https://example.org/iiif into https://example.org/iiif/folder requires all images to start with folder/. This folder/ prefix will then be removed from all images.

Moving a folder

It is possible to use the Split and Merge actions to move all images in a single folder within the same server:

  1. Split the old folder away from the server. For example, split https://example.org/iiif on old/.
  2. Update the new image server’s URL to rename the folder, for example from https://example.org/iiif/old to https://example.org/iiif/new.
  3. Merge the new image server into the original one.

This is equivalent to renaming the paths for all images in old/ in the server to new/.