Helpful Software
Work on CollectionBuilder projects involves manipulating metadata and digital files. This page lists some open source tools that might help your workflow when preparing collection contents – beyond the software used in building the site.
OpenRefine (spreadsheets, data wrangling)
OpenRefine is a free and open source “power tool for working with messy data”. It is great for exploring, cleaning, and transforming data. If you have extensive work to transform existing metadata or description into something for use in CollectionBuilder, this might be the tool you need!
Resources:
LibreOffice Calc (spreadsheets)
LibreOffice is a free and open source office application suite (similar to Microsoft Office). “Calc” is their fully featured spreadsheet app (similar to Excel). Calc can correctly import and create UTF-8 CSVs (unlike Excel).
GIMP (image editing)
GIMP is a free and open source image editing application (similar to PhotoShop). It is a powerful, fully featured, and high quality editor that can edit any image format and do batch processing.
Squoosh (image optimizing)
Squoosh is a browser-based app that can efficiently optimize images. If you have images that are too big for displaying on the web, you can use it to optimize the format to significantly reduce file size while still retaining image quality. All processing is done on your local computer–this is not a cloud service and does not send your data out!