Picture Labels

Some time ago I was searching for a specific specimen with Faujasite-Ca crystals I had photographed some months before. If the specimen has a label this should not be difficult. But such a search may be complicated by the fact that the photographed part is small and a full drawer was filled with many specimens different variations of Faujasite-crystals from the same location. It took me a considerable time to locate the spot again on the specimen, which is 4x8 cm and shows many cavities with hundreds of small crystals. Once located, a white tape arrow points now to the specific cavity and crystal. But how easy to find the piece of limburgite Rock under a few hundred ?


I before had experimented with picture labels. The 25 mm Micro-Mount boxes are to small to put any picture on it, but it works well with 4x6 cm cardboard boxes ore plastic box of this size or larger. A micro-mount box fits into this cardboard box and can carry its own label. After some experimenting I make the labels now this way:

The finalized picture from photography process which is about 3800 pixels wide, is loaded into Irfanview, cropped to a suitable format and resized to either maximal 936 pixels width or maximal 722 pixels hight. Why this numbers ? This is the optimal 94 % size to be integrated into presentations with a 1024 x 736 resolution. If this is done the picture is sharpened for optimal sharpness on the screen and saved. Irfan view has a function to write text in a picture. This is used now to label the picture with mineral Name(s), Location, Size of specimen, species number and a copyright with my name. This picture is saved with all the about 20 pictures which have been made for picture stacking. A second copy with the text in it is saved in the mineral names directories, this I call the index picture and is used to search for pictures an a 500 Gbyte hard disk. This type of picture is also eventually uploaded to mindat. After some experiments I found that a 12 point Arial text in bold is good to read in a presentation, on Montor and on a printed label. On the printed 4x6 cm label I can read it, but some may need a loupe.
Finally for all small specimens (and large specimens with small crystals), I print a picture label with a colour laser printer on adhesive labels (Avery 3481). Irfan view allows to locate and size the picture on the sheet and about 50 % of the labels can be used if single prints are made. After about ten runs trough the printer the sheet is discarded to avoid paper jams.

Finally the Label is adhered on the cover of the box. and now it´s easy to find specific mircro crystals in a large pool of specimens.



Printing a label and adhering on the box takes less than 2 minutes and helps to find a specimen in a big pool of similar things. Its also very practical to find a specific micro mount.

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