GNU Photo Archiving software?

jonr asks: "After I got my Olympus E-100RS camera, I have been enjoying photography again. I now take on average dozens photos a day. Now the problem is ever growing photo collection. I found an excellent archiving software, IMatch but I'm looking for something similar to run under Linux. Folders and sub-folders are are just not cutting it. IMatch allows me to put my photos in a category tree, e.g. a photo of my dog could be placed in Family/Pets and Animals/Dogs. It also has off-line archiving, a must have for growing collection. Now does anybody know of a tool or a collection of tools for this?"

Comments

Re:Am I oversimplifying the problem here?

[renehollan]

Perhaps creative use of symlinks wasn't considered? That would relieve the limitation of a single hierarchical key for a given image. Careful renaming and relinking when off-line migration takes place would take care of on-line vs. off-line issues. However, there are still some problems with this:

While it leverages filesystem tools, it isn't user friendly: one still needs some kind of app to tie it all together (and answer questions like, "Under what other keys is this image also indexed?"). I call this the "reverse-symlink" problem: what are the symlinks to a given cannonical file name?

Also, symlinks to symlinks (keys to on-line version to possibly off-line nfs-mountable media) tend to add inefficiency, although I don't reall see two levels as all that problematic.

Still, it does look like a quick and dirty poor-man's hack. Don't give up on the simple and obvious just yet.

Here we go

[n8willis]

*sigh* Yet another Ask Slashdot where "How do I do X?" gets greeted with a slew of non-answers refusing to even consider the question at hand. "You don't need to do that!" "I've never done it, but why would anyone need to?" "Don't. Do something else!"

Well, here are some projects that do do what you want, in one way or another.

• photoseek.sourceforge.net
  
• gpc.sourceforge.net
  
• www.menalto.com/projects/gallery
  
• photoarch.sourceforge.net
  
• photo.sourceforge.net
  
• liw.iki.fi/liw/lodju
  
• www.seindal.dk/rene/software/sights

Photoseek, Lodju and GPC are the only ones that are not designed to be web-interface only. Several of the numerous "web gallery" packages have good indexing capabilities, but are primarily geared at presentation, not cataloging.

The non-Web-gallery programs are all relatively young-in-the-lifecycle projects. Although GPC seems to be the furthest along, my initial experience with Photoseek was better -- but it has been so long since a release that I'm not sure how healthy development is.

Don't listen to anybody who suggests that you do it all by hand with flat files. They've never tried.

Nate