20 February 2008

Tons of clipart: openclipart.org daily snapshot

Open Clip Art LibraryQuite late, a couple of years late, the 0.18 release of the Open Clip Art Library got packaged for Fedora and is expected to hit a Rawhide near you (thanks lkundrak for that).

But that release is ancient, in the meantime we changed the site infrastructure (and lost the ability to do formal releases), gathered thousands of new images from hundreds of new users. What to do, lots of people want the images, we have them but no easy way to bulk download?

Open Clip Art LibraryI present you the daily SVG snapshot: a large tarball containing all the SVG and SVGZ files from our ccHost installation. Today's (the first) snapshot is 156 MB (tar.bz2, it extracts in about 600 MB) and contain over 8.000 images (all of them released as Public Domain).

As a downside, it does lack meaningful structure, the files are grouped in folders by authors, not by topics/keywords/tags and we don't have keywords metadata inside SVG, so searching is a daunting task. But this is the best I can do, provide at least the content.

Note that this does not replace the old 0.18 release, is complementary and contain mostly images submitted after that release (even if this is changing at a glacial speed as some of us re-upload by hand images from the old site to the new one).

Open Clip Art LibraryI forgot something? Yes, the link to the tarball, of course, the most important thing :D Go to the Open Clip Art Library downloads page and get daily_SVG_snapshot.tar.bz2 (no direct link from my blog as I'm not sure if it's a good idea do for a 156 MB download).

So use the clipart, enjoy it and maybe contribute back!

4 comments:

  1. Nicu,

    Thanks for doing this. I think it's important for OCAL. Hopefully the two releases can be merged shortly.

    Ted

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unfortunately, they will not merged in the foreseeable future. We don't have a tool to batch import the old release and don't have a contributor who can write such a tool. So the only option is to re-upload them one by one by hand... imagine this for over 7000 images.
    At this pace it will not be ready this year.

    ReplyDelete
  3. hi nicu,
    I have been seeing your posts for a while. I wonder, why you couldn't make a .torrent & then a .metalink file. I'm sure there are many people who would join the bandwagon. Tell me what u think?

    ReplyDelete
  4. I don't think is a good idea to distribute with BT a package which change daily. If we had monthly releases, yes, but this tarball is about making available the latest uploads.

    ReplyDelete