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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?"
http://www.opensourcedirectory.org/projects/gphoto coll/
Found with a quick google search.
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
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.
You could've hired me.
Use iPhoto. It was made for just this purpose and does it very well. Works on any images in general, but can take you from downloading from the camera to sending a layout doc to Apple for printing...
Note that I said "shoot" date, not file creation date. Real software for this type of task is database-driven and is what pro photographers need to maintain thousands of files, and be able to search them and subsearch them.
ln -s that.
I can't think of anything better. I also have some directories that have over 1000 files in them, and using konqueror to view the thumbnails works like a charm.
I really can't think of why you'd need any other software to create a directory for you based on what you want to list the files under when it is so easy to do it in gqview. I.E. File -> new directory , then select files and then right click and move them to your directory. I guess by naming them as a category this save a step or two, but its really insignificant IMHO.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Not to mention that Keywords and Category could have dozens of entries each. Consider a picture of the WTC cleanup. Category alone could give you WTC, NYC, Terrorism, Fire Dept, rescue, news, 2001, emergency, and Guiliani just at first glance. And that's an easy one. Stock photos are much worse. If you try organizing your images by hand-symlinking folders, you're rapidly going to end up with an exponentially-expanding mess that you then have to hand navigate every time you want to make a change. And that's assuming you do it all correct the first time through; forget about it when you throw in human error.
Besides, what you're really doing in that scenario is hand-creating a relational database. Why on earth would you want to go through that mess when there are industrial strength database packages out there that do it all for you?
Nate
-- Watch the REAL Jon Katz.
Yes, a poor-man's solution: quick and dirty.
Why on earth would you want to go through that mess when there are industrial strength database packages out there that do it all for you?
Hmm, "industrial strenght" strikes me as expensive, in this context (someone wanting to manage their personal digital photos).
I'd probably start with a symlink method, and if the catagorization really started to get out of hand, consider automated tools to generate the links based on a KWIK indexing technique, or move to a proper meta-data database.
But, the symlink technique does not preclude eventual migration to a more powerful beast, like a bona-fide database. In fact, it should be a simple matter to populate the latter with the metadata represented by the former. Thus, it seams like a decent intermediate step before going all out.
Frankly, I just can't imagine the number of keys per item being all that large. It strikes me that you're arguing for a "mod-foo" solution when I'm suggesting trying "foo cgi-bin" first. They both have their place.
You could've hired me.
I've found that the cannonical starting point usually reflects existing mechanical hierarchies -- in my case, how I've organized my CDs.
You could've hired me.
Sounds expensive in terms of disk I/O (reading all those directories). I suppose you could do a similar thing with symlinks (find all links that point to the same cannonical file, assuming a single level link to keep it simple), thus removing the single-partition limit, and cache the results for rapid access. A cron job could do this.
You could've hired me.
Well, here are some projects that do do what you want, in one way or another.
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
-- Watch the REAL Jon Katz.
him: I want software for linux that does x
/pub/computer/nerd/my/pc/
them1: software, shmoftware! Linux users are men! Write a script! Bootstrap the damn thing!
them2: I tore apart a sega dreamcast and converted my 27" jamma console into a multimedia photo archival unit. Check out the links here
them3: Why in gods name would you want to archive something as stupid as photos anyway? I just take pictures of my computer, and put them in a directory called
The question is not why or when or how but Is there any software available! Jeesh guys, its a simple question.
Of course, I don't know the answer to that question either, so file this one under a troll I guess.
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
The Gallery is my definite favorite. Features and ease of installation are unbelievable. "Gallery is a slick web based photo album written using PHP. Easy to install (it includes a config wizard), it provides users with the ability to create and maintain their own albums in the album collection via an intuitive web interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums can have read, write and caption permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy." But if you want more choice, have a look around and you will really be spoilt for choice. On a side note, Slashdot is not freshmeat! Get a clue and learn how to use a search engine !
Why not just use the filesystem to categorize pictures, and some other solution for hierarchical storage or removable media cataloging? Then, when you want to look for a picture, you just search for the directory/category name, and it'll either tell you where it is
Yes, you are oversimplifying. Big time.
I work for a newspaper. Our single greatest technological hurdle is archiving in some sort or reasonable fashion.
You'd think the Associated Press would have this figured out. They create tens of thousands of pictures a day. They have the big stick to get the system built. They had their developers create a product called 'AP Preserver'. It was to be the end-all be-all photo archive solution. After many years of trying to get it right, they dropped the product. Even with all their knowledge of the subject and a rather large check book, they couldn't get it right.
In the past, archiving photos was easy. They were physical and humanity was well versed with physical items. No longer is that the case. Digital photos are a pain in the buttocks.
Part of the problem is expectations are higher now that photos are digital. When photos were on strips of film, often times they weren't kept for more than five or ten years. Even folks who kept them longer generally didn't keep out-takes (photos not used in the newspaper).
Now, we are expected to keep every picture taken by every photographer of every event forever. Worse than that, folks want to be able to search for photos using keywords and sometimes even by what the picture looks like. (For example, if you want all the profile pictures of Bush, all you'd need to do is find a picture of Bush in profile and then feed it to the search engine and it will find the rest. (Just for clarification, when I say 'profile pictures of Bush', I mean profile pictures of President Bush and not profile pictures of hairy bush.)
The fairly large newspaper I work for creates a gig or so of photos and graphics each day (speaking only for Editorial and not Advertising). We use a product called Portfolio by Extensis. It runs on an NT server which doesn't help the AskSlashdotter in the least. We will probably use Portfolio for another couple years until CCI's MediaStore is ready for prime time.
Some will say I'm being silly by comparing a major newspaper to a guy with a digital camera. We both face the same issues of cataloging and retrieval. The only difference is that he is probably using a 60-gig harddrive and we're using a multi-terabyte array.
Anyone who thinks that archiving photos is easy has never tried.
I'm sorry to report that there are no great photo archiving solutions. Find the one that sucks the least and you have accomplished much.
Matt
Besides, the guy said he takes a dozen pictures a day, which even for a few keys is well out of hand over the course of a year. Even one key each is 4380 pictures.
And it seemed to me like the whole essence of his question was how to move up from the quick-and-dirty to something nicer like the Mac (iPhoto) and Windows (iMatch or whatever he mentioned) users have available to them.
Nate
PS - Oh crud, I just realized I forgot to list one option in my other post about real programs: Photodex, Inc. makes a commercial image-management program called Compupic. You can check it out at www.photodex.com.
A couple of distributions do include the free version on their "supplemental" CD's, but I heard about it because we use it where I work (where last week I spent fifteen hours cataloging and searching photo databases that stretch back 25 years and have dozens of keys per image, which is why I'm so bitter about this issue today....).
I'd be a little wary of the free Linux version; it's clearly the red-headed-stepchild of their prodcut family, and the supported Windows version I have to use is a pain enough.
-- Watch the REAL Jon Katz.
show me some awk that will find every picture sorted by shoot date, black-and-white, done for a particular client. And tag for me the ones most recently accessed.
try this:
http://www.linux.it/~carlos/nosql/
but an RDBMS for saving the metainfo of a few snaps you've got to be kidding right?
thousands, wooo steady on, the meta info might not fit on this floppy disk, I'll have to gzip it!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Will CCI provide conversion tools to migrate from the Portfolio product, or will you have to do the process on your own?
I'm pretty sure that CCI will write an import process to pull photos out of AP Preserver. I doubt they will do the same for Portfolio. It's not as universal as Perserver.
Since Portfolio doesn't alter the orignal image, worst case is that we'll have to import millions of photos into the new solution from scratch, losing good metadata. Portfolio does have a way to export data (or so I'm told) so I suspect we'll have to pay someone (probably CCI) to write an import script which will keep our yummy metadata. But I'm not holding my breath.
Migration of data from one image archive platform is a real problem. We have had at least three solutions this far and getting data out of one into the next is always painful.
Unlike text archiving which we figured out long ago, photo and image archiving is still a mystery. Our text archive is virtually unchanged since we bought it online in 1983 except for the addition of some drive space (it now has 12 gig online!) and a web interface (it was telnet only). In fact, the hardware is some of the oldest in the building.
Matt
Thanks for the link.