Hi Etienne,
First of all, I assume there is no way to recover this metadata file from an existing backup. The expectation is that the naming/organization of the files is consistent and self-descriptive in order to be able to recreate the SPW layout.
For an OMERO workflow , there are really two classes of solutions: 1- post-import i.e. importing the images as they are into the system and add the SPW layout using the API e.g. via an
OMERO.script 2- pre-import as you suggest, i.e. recreating a metadata file such that the fileset is detected as HCS by Bio-Formats.
For the second option, what kind of file format was the file originally stored under? I assume there is no available tool from the manufacturer to recreate this structure.
In a
recent ome-users thread discussing a similar problem, we suggest companion OME-XML files could be a viable option to describe datasets composed of multiple TIFF files with rich metadata such as a Screen/Plate/Well layout.
There is currently no official example but the thread contains some prototype of how this fileset could look like.
If Python is an option, we started prototyping a simple experimental library for generating this type of metadata files. So far this has been applied in production for non-HCS datasets in the context of IDR but some code exists to handle SPW datasets (see e.g
this snippet).
Best,
Sebastien
