Law Enforcement Software
Law Enforcement Software
Crimestar is ready to save your digital images to its database using a variety of popular digital cameras. Photos can be imported from a file on disk or captured (Acquired) directly from your camera providing that your camera uses the standard Microsoft Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) protocol which has been inclusive in all versions of Microsoft Windows since Windows ME/XP. Once this type of device is installed and registered with the Windows operating system CrimeStar will use this device directly to capture images.
Unlike other systems that store the images on the computer in some directory or folder then simply point to the path for the image, Crimestar preserves the integrity of the image via security by imbedding the image into the database. The benefit to this approach is that images are less likely to be tampered with and they can be viewed from any computer than has access to the Crimestar database.
The equipment needed for this capability is actually very inexpensive. When this capability was being developed, Crimestar Corporation used a very inexpensive Logitech QuickCam™ VC – Video Conference Camera and a Microsoft LifeCam 5000. These device and many others are available from various retail computer outlets. These inexpensive cameras and "web-cams" can be an ideal way to easily capture good quality digital images directly at the time of Booking or directly into the Master Name Index.
Remember since images are stored imbedded into the database tables, maintaining a reasonable image file size is important. Newer high-resolution cameras can take great photos, but the resulting file size of those images can be extremely large. The purpose of the image in the Crimestar system is to identify a suspect. Generally smaller low-resolution images meet that need quite well, consume much less disk space and help the system perform considerably faster than using large sized high resolution images.
Digital images can be associated with the following Modules and files:
* Professional Edition users should remember that the maximum size of any single table in the database is 2 Gigabytes, thus large digital images can and will fill the database photo table quickly.