I am collecting images for scrapbook/bookmarking/personal use

[tomcrane]

I want to put them in a IIIF Manifest and publish it to accompany a blog post - I'll embed a IIIF Viewer pointing to my Manifest. I'm not a developer, but I can do a bit of HTML and I know that if you click the UV's embed button it gives you a code snippet you can use - so if I put my images in a manifest, then open it in the UV, then generate the embed code - I'll be able to put my manifest with my images, in a viewer, in the blog post.

I go to the Manifest Editor site. It suggests a few templates¹ I could use but I just pick "New empty Manifest". The initial screen goes, but then something else pops up, prompting me to Add Content or Import IIIF. It also says "these options are available from the File menu" in a piece of help text.

I know that a lot of the images I want to include are already IIIF, because they are paintings, I can see the IIIF logo on their web pages. And some of the images are single pages out of digitised books which I have been viewing in the UV, so they must be IIIF. But some of the images I want to include are definitely not IIIF, they are just things I have found in Google image search.

After some experimenting, I realise I can add new pages to my manifest in lots of different ways.

On the Import IIIF dialogue, I can paste a IIIF URL in directly, and it will show me a preview of the image. Sometimes it shows me multiple thumbnails to select from (I realise this is when I paste a Manifest URL in) and I pick the ones I want to include. Once I pasted the actual web page URL in by mistake, rather than a IIIF URL - but after a few seconds it still came up with the IIIF Manifest. So I pick up how to get images from IIIF in there.

Other times I just paste an image URL in directly, that I found from image searching.
If I do this in the Add content dialog, it just adds it as another page in the Manifest, but if I do this from Import IIIF, it says "This link is not a IIIF resource and no IIIF resources could be found linked from it - do you want to add this image as content?"².

I've found I can also browse IIIF directly - there's a heading called "Browse IIIF Collections" that has a list of museums and libraries in it. I didn't find this all that useful because it's often hard to find anything like that, but sometimes you can strike gold, e.g., find a whole collection of manifests organised by subject. Then it becomes easier to use this directly from the tool rather than going backwards and forwards between different web sites and the Manifest Editor. But most of the time it's easier to find things by searching a museum's site directly.

Either way I build up quite a big set of IIIF images in my manifest. As I select each one in the editor I can add titles and descriptions (that will appear page-to-page in the UV) but I notice that those I've imported from other IIIF Manifests have kept any labels and other metadata they had from their source manifests. Usually I just leave this, but on a few of them I edited for consistency across my images. I understand that this has just been copied across when I imported.

Every so often I use the Preview option to see what it looks like in the UV. I don't know how that preview works, it just does!

I've been doing all this previewing, but there's a little warning when you do that³ that the preview only lasts 48 hours, so that's no good. But I can see that in the Save menu, the first option is Permalink. When I save there it generates a link like a Google doc - and that's my Manifest. So I can use that.

There are also some links right there after I saved that show my Manifest in different viewers, so I can just open it directly in the UV and grab the embed code.

Footnotes

1. On the Splash screen ↩

2. Needs further examination! ↩

3. How? Also, should we insert a piece of metadata into the preview Manifest that gives this warning? That might get annoying especially if you are testing metadata rendering... ↩