AAC Talking Tabs - Tutorial. Adding images and indexing them

Adding images and indexing them

How we can manage images

    

Let's see how we can get images. For example let's search for a food, the apricot. We have to go in edit mode, we select the food tab, do a tap on a placeholder and press edit. There are three options:

  • Use the camera application to return the object. There is little to explain. However, some tablet expect that the pictures are taken in landscape mode. If you shoot in portrait mode, these will be rotated 90 degrees. Sometimes the best solution is to take a picture of the object outside the application directly invoking the camera application and then use the browse button to get it from documents.
  • Use the documents selector. With the latest versions of S.O. choosing documents allows you to get the image also from drive rather than from Dropbox or any application that handles images. Choose gallery or photo if you want to get them from the image stored in your tablet. The selected image is shown instead of the placeholder.
  • Use the file manager that allows you to search for images in the file system or by indexed images. If we use it to browse pictures, it behaves much like the gallery application of the tablet; I choose an image and this is shown in the placeholder.
    If we begin to write something on the search field at the top, it shows the indexed images as search result. This includes ARASAAC images bundled with the application and any folders of images you've indexed.
    If before pressing the button the file manager you have written a word on the description field, this is used as a search field.
    If you use a long tap instead of a tap, the search field will be empty regerdless the description field (for example when you know for sure that there is no symbols for that description)
      

How do we index the custom images?

In order to use other images such as symbols pcs or any other symbol set, you must have them in a suitable format, such as jpg or png. These images must obviously be loaded on the tablet somewhere via usb drive or others. In the example above, the images has been saved under the folder
[Sdcard] / Color / ...
organized in subdirectories (1998, 2000, ... Italy, Main).

The images obviously must have the name of the file that corresponds to the image (banana.jpg will be the symbol of the banana for example!).
Then we go on the menu item "Indexing Images" from the main dashboard. If the menu does not appear, you probably have locked the application via the "Lock" menu. In this case, press unlock, solve the aritmetic operation to get the full menu.

So, to index images, we have to select the directories you want to index. For example, if I select the folder "Color", all the folders beneath are also selected. At the time when I select the folder, the application scans all subfolders to understand what it has to index. So, if I select Color, I'll see that all subfolders are selected.

If there are images to be indexed, the menu item "indexes the images now" is activated; just press this entry and the application scans all selected directories to store the name of all the images in a database. After the indexing process (which may take several minutes) you can search indexed images (in this case pcs images) exactly as we search for ARASAAC images.

      

The results of the search of "apricot" will be as in the picture above, where are displayed both images from ARASAAC library and those image that I've just indexed.

You can check how i works also watching the youtube movie at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtTOsFtfRX4 at minute 3:56 (search for not indexed pcs images) and 4:48 minutes ( indexing of about 10.00 pcs images, and how to use them)