Almost all of us have experienced the frustration of searching for a document we created in the past. Whether it is a spreadsheet of last quarter’s sales figures, a mission-critical report on 2007’s quality control improvements, or a list of contact names, we are so consumed with creating our documents that we often neglect to think about finding them later.

Enter the era of digital microscopy. It is not uncommon for quality control, manufacturing, or research and development (R&D) facilities to acquire from thousands to hundreds of thousands of images per year from their microscopes and other image-acquisition devices. Many of these images may also carry important data tags, such as supporting spreadsheets, measurement reports, or analytical data derived from these images.

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