Tool suggestions for Art History Database?

Posted by Susanne
Jan 3, 2013 at 10:13 AM

(sorry, long question)
For about a year now, I’ve been putting up daily art posts onto Google+. Now I find that I no longer have control over the masses of data and images and don’t really want to repeat myself too often. Though I have most of the information in Evernote, I need more structure and would appreciate any suggestions. The current setup is:
- posts on Google+
- jpg images with date of post, artist and work as file name
- evernote notes about artists, styles, periods, works, etc.

My ideal setup would be to enter an artists name and see:
- any material I have already posted
- information I have about the artist
- other artists and works of around the same period (timeline !?!)
or enter a date, Jan. 4th and see:
- what I posted a Jan. 4th
- any artists who were either born or died on a Jan. 4th

I need:
- Chrome both on a netbook and a pc
- something that stores and displays images well
- something that handles large amounts of data well - probably many hundreds of mb.
- something that will let me quickly capture/enter information (mostly from the web)

Evernote is too unstructured, though I like the ability to have my information available wherever I am, but I am finding that some form of structure is a must. And I would really like something similar to a timeline.

I have already considered/played with:
1) TheBrain: no timeline, no structured info, but linking info as thoughts might work.
Drawback: getting information (mostly from web) into thoughts is cumbersome, not sure about how it handles database size.
2) Connected Text: Wiki aspect might be nice, though getting information in is even worse than TheBrain and also no timeline - not sure about how it handles database size.
3) UltraRecall: getting information in is fairly good (except for from Chrome), structure should be possible, good display of images, Drawbacks: no timeline, linking items is cumbersome
4) Zoot: structure and getting information in is good, Drawbacks: saved searches? Database size? No timeline, images are displayed original size, which is a problem with large dpis, and importing from evernote doesn’t work for me - also Zoot crashes fairly regularly on my machines.
5) InfoQube: Has timeline (Gantt) but have not found a way to enter January 3rd, 1543, or gantt view decades or centuries. This would probably do best with the types of searching I want to do (grids). Drawbacks: database size? learning curve, limitations of timeline view.

Many mindmapping tools have gantt possibilities, but those are meant for tasks, not centuries and the size is not manageable in a map. Cloud won’t work because of performance and size, Portability/Synch is nice but not a must.

Any thoughts, and especially your experiences with large dbs in any of the tools would be much appreciated!

Many thanks and a very Happy New Year,
Susanne