Flutterby™! : I abandoned writing my photo manager

I abandoned writing my photo manager

2013-03-24 23:16:13.527052+00 by Dan Lyke 10 comments

I abandoned writing my photo manager back in '06 or so, but I still haven't found one I actually like to better organize all these pictures.

[ related topics: Photography Writing ]

comments in descending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2013-04-03 05:29:21.135133+00 by: brennen

Re: xmms: So. Much. Rage.

I've been using DeaDBeeF for locally stored files for a while now. It's good enough, as far as it goes, but I really don't want much of anything that XMMS didn't do more-or-less perfectly in, like, 2002...

#Comment Re: made: 2013-03-27 17:05:22.419414+00 by: Dan Lyke

Also realizing that I'd like some sort of system where Charlene can tag photos on her machine and I can tag them on mine and we can reconcile that somehow. digiKam might be enough of an interface that I can build some "sync/reconcile databases" tools.

I'm frustrated that a fairly common issue (collapse tags) required writing SQL to do, I'm glad that it was possible to do so.

#Comment Re: made: 2013-03-26 20:50:23.57649+00 by: Dan Lyke

Using digiKam right now. So. Close. And so freakin' annoying.

#Comment Re: made: 2013-03-26 16:06:55.730521+00 by: Dan Lyke

First try, digiKam crashed on import (with resident memory use of 1.8G, and I suspect since it brought in a whole bunch of :i386 libraries, 32 bit issues). It's running now, I'm building the image indices so it can find duplicates. My old scheme, which fed into Flutterby.com, has IMG_####.JPG along-side IMG_####.{sm,md,lg}.jpg. I'd nuke *.*.jpg, but I suspect that in a few places I've had data corruption and the best extant version of the image is IMG_####.lg.jpg.

On media players: OMG, all media players suck. I wish XMMS were at least still maintained, because that could do "play this folder and that folder" with "xmms folder1/*.mp3 folder2/*.mp3".

#Comment Re: made: 2013-03-26 16:01:46.658196+00 by: Mars Saxman

Thanks for the response. I don't know whether Mylo will turn out to be something you would use, but we might as well try to get it right while we have the chance!

#Comment Re: made: 2013-03-26 05:40:56.279075+00 by: brennen

I just had a look at the digiKam sqlite stuff - at least on the somewhat ancient stable version I'm using, it'd be a few lines of Perl to create and associate tags based on metadata in the filename.

#Comment Re: made: 2013-03-26 05:37:21.371793+00 by: brennen

For what it's worth, I have a fairly similar list of requirements, and I've been using digiKam on Linux for a couple of years now and haven't yet felt moved to ditch it. It doesn't move files or muck with my existing directory structure, and it has some tolerably decent tools for dealing with duplicate images, indexing into the entire collection by date, etc. Also it uploads to Flickr and handles the raw formats I use acceptably.

There's a plugin architecture and the data store is sqlite, so writing a tagger based on intercapped names might not be too difficult.

On the downside, performance isn't always spectacular and there are a bunch of KDE library dependencies, but neither of these things has been sufficient motivation to move on to anything lighter. I think it's worth a look.

#Comment Re: made: 2013-03-25 11:36:54.661216+00 by: meuon

I have a similar list of things for music files. I tend to sort what I want into directories as collections. I like to point VLC at a directory and hit random play. For some reason, the "popular" music managers classify most of my stuff as "Other"

#Comment Re: made: 2013-03-25 04:20:55.549316+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

The things I want:

Don't move my pictures.
If the EXIF data is valid, allow me folder-by-folder control over categorize by date (because scanning date is not necessarily a useful tool), otherwise don't assume that they're dated as-of import.
If they're named using intercaps, and if the folder they're in is named using intercaps, pull those in as keywords.
Find duplicates, and understand that I may have multiple resolution versions of the same image. I'm willing to give big broad hints based on filename, too.
Bonus: Understand images on different computers and keep track of them. But see #1, I have structure, and tools which understand my structure, so don't move my pictures.
Understand geography. Let me put 'em on a map.

And the big one:

Run on Linux (and, yes, I'll pay for it).

#Comment Re: made: 2013-03-25 00:18:05.416568+00 by: Mars Saxman

I'd love to hear more about what you are looking for. The startup I am working for is building software intended for people who take a lot of pictures; perhaps it would suit you.