@heather: I am not really sure, how do you exactly need the lists and the images cut out, but in general I would be willing to help you as well. 
I realized, sometimes you already have the instructions but no inventoried pieces. are you distributing the plans to volunteers on demand?
what about a little tutorial, here at playmofriends?
best
socrates
Hi Socrates,
Thanks for volunteering! The far-and-away most time-consuming step is making the list of parts. Just a list that looks like the "Show text-only list" page linked at the top of inventory-pages will suffice:
Part # Count Name
-- -- --
30 02 6140 1x Ground with 3 holes for mushroom stems (light green)
30 02 6460 1x Fern leaves, small (inner) (light green)
30 02 6480 1x Fern leaves, large (outer) (light green)
30 02 7120 1x Hedgehog, mama (brown; tan)
30 02 7130 2x Hedgehog, baby (brown; tan)
30 07 9740 1x Mushroom stems (white)
30 10 2150 1x Boy, white top & frilly collar, green shorts
30 27 7420 1x Tree stump, hollow, large (dark brown)
30 64 5930 1x Mushroom caps, spots (red)
30 65 2752 1x Hat, mushroom-shaped (child-size) (red/white; white spots)
30 88 9252 1x Instructions for 4194
Any format, separator, program, whatever you're comfortable with. (I use Excel, because it's so easy to filter and sort with.) Sylvia was very meticulous about what she named parts, by going back and searching for similar parts already in the database, but just a word or two to indicate which part you mean is sufficient to aid proofreading. I am also picky about names and may change them if I see fit; and some may already exist (or exist in a different colour, which should get the same name), so the name doesn't need to be re-invented. The colour and quantity are important. For sets with more than, say, eight pages, I also note the page number the part is found on, to aid proofreading and to help find the correct little picture to crop.
The little pictures: also beautifully done for these sets by Sylvia. I crop a rectangle around the part
and its number and shrink it to 100 pixels high. (I don't expand smaller ones, because I can then search on size and find ones that need improved quality.) I reduce the colour palette to 16 colours and save as a non-transparent GIF, with the number as the file name: "30 88 9252.gif". (I don't shrink or de-colour klickies or stickers, usually.) This makes the graphic file
really small, under 1 K in some cases, and when you are showing pictures for a 100+part set you'll appreciate that! The instruction thumbnail I make by making 100-pixel-high copies of all the pages and sticking them together; if the result is ridiculously wide I'll make a second or even third row. Instructions aren't de-coloured either, since the result is universally ugly. I can almost always do all of these steps with IrfanView, a simple free Windows program.
So, either or both of these chunks can be done by volunteers. Use your own instructions, or I'll send you a set you'd like to tackle. Once you send me a list, I have to check for each part's existence, create the part (with category and subcategory) if it doesn't exist, and add the part to the set. I can make pictures or process ones you make, afterwards. Other jobs: scanning, see above; translating German-named parts to English (the German names are kept, if I ever get a bilingual site running); submitting invoices from Direct Service that show parts I don't have; filling in missing pictures; categorizing
TO BE ASSIGNED parts, imported wholesale from playmobil.de but mostly not yet put into sets (use existing cat/subcat names); take detailed pictures of klickies without accessories and/or write up descriptions of their body-parts a la Who's That Klicky. (For this last, make absolutely sure the hair/beard (nor anything else!) has been altered from the factory settings.) Some sets have a lot of parts but the hand-count is not known, and therefore can't be marked COMPLETE; these just need verification, so you can copy the list from "show text-list only" and fill in any blanks.
How's that? Think you can find something to help with, out of all that? Any contribution warmly welcomed; just let me know what you're up to and feel free to ask questions.
Good grief, what an essay. I should make it into a webpage on the site, for visitors who don't pass through here. I'll add it to the list.
Cheers, Heather
