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I am the edge!

23 June 2010 21:50

Over the past few years I've amassed a collection of a few thousand images taken with a succession of digital cameras.

I'm pretty good at organising images, in a directory hierarchy which makes sense to me, in a few simple and broad categories:

skx@birthday:~$ tree -L 1 ~/Images/
/home/skx/Images/
|-- Misc
|-- Parties
|-- People
|-- Pets & Animals
`-- Travel

Beneath ~/Images/People, for example, I have subdirectories for specific individuals (or a "Debian/" folder for Debian-people who've been snapped but don't warrant their own folder.)

~/Images/Travel has things like Travel/Local/2010, Travel/Vienna/2008, etc.

In summary I have images of people, places, and things stored beneath what should be a reasonably discoverable directory hierarchy, however this just doesn't work. I still struggle to find images - for example images of myself might be located in ~/Images/People/Self/*, but in practise I'm often included in ~/Images/Travel/* as well.

A few times I've looked at using f-spot, digikam, and similar tools to perform image-organisation (but not editing, or timelines, or anything else. Just organisation). I've found I didn't like being locked into their formats, didn't want them to copy my images to a second location, and other gripes. In the end I've forced myself to come up with a Steve-Specific-Solution. Not for the first time, but I think I have just cause...

I'm now using the User-Comment field in the image's EXIF data to store tags. (When it comes to EXIF data I keep camera-generated fields, but sometimes update/set "Copyright", "Comment", and "Title" fields. So UserComment is one I've never used until now, and thus I run no risk of trashing existing meta-data.)

I've put together a simple perl script, called itag, which will:

  • Index the tag information from all images beneath ~/Images into a DBM file.
  • Show the filenames of all images matching a tag, or tags.
  • Allow me to add tag(s) to an image (which both updates the EXIF data and updates the DBM "cache").

This is enough for me to be able to see all images of "Edinburgh", via:

~$ qiv --fullscreen --slide --delay 5 $(itag --search=edinburgh)

Similarly I could find myself:

~$ itag --search=steve --search=people

I'm not sure it is useful to others, mostly on the basis that people probably fall into their own routine when it comes to filing, and I suspect that people with vast collections of images will just get annoyed by the obscenely slow indexing process I've got. (Hint: run "exiftool" on every /.jpe?g$/i file..)

Still its a simple enough idea and I think it should scale in the future - I can even see myself writing a wee GUI to do tag exploration and similar. Just not today.

ObFilm:Aeon Flux

ObRandom: Apologies for people waiting on email - it's been that kind of week.

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Good morning, Bastian

25 June 2010 21:50

So previously I introduced the idea of my image-tagging system. There seemed to be at least a little interest. So here's a brief introduction and real update.

There is a command line tool, itag, which will index the UserComment field from a hierarchy of JPG files. (This field is compatible with digikam, by happy accident).

Additionally there are a pair of GUI tools, both very nasty in terms of code quality and extensibility:

itagview

This presents a list of all the tags which are found, (by invoking "itag --tags"), and allows you to view thumbnails of all images with a single specific tag. Double-click to launch the image full-sized.

itagger

This is a GUI tool which will present thumbnails of all images beneath a given directory, recursively, and allow you to enter tags either on individual images, or on multiple ones.

This doesn't update the DBM cache file that itag uses though, so you'll want to re-run that aftward.

Anyway enough pimping, if you like the sound of it visit the itag page. If you're optimistic, abhor reading, and just wanna play then there is an itag package for Lenny.

Patches welcome, especially to the nasty Gtk2 code...

ObFilm: The NeverEnding Story

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New backported packages!

10 July 2010 21:50

Since I'm I'm using real titles I guess I should make a real post, in which real things are mentioned. Unfortunately recently most of my time has been spent offline, doing things in and around Edinburgh.

However I have done a few things which are possibly worthy of mention. My Lenny repository has been updated a little:

The Gimp

There's a slightly newer version of The Gimp available now, corresponding to a recent upload to unstable.

gtk-gnutella

Once again I was forced to update the backported gtk-gnutella package, as my previous one was too old to connect to the network.

itag

Finally I added a Lenny package for the itag software which is now essentially complete.

Of those things I had a lot of fun with the itag software. Partly because it allows me to horde my images in a way that I appreciate, but also because it made me go over some older images and be pleasantly suprised.

My personal archive, ~/Images, is now just over 80Gb, and goes back about ten years. (Of course the older images were taken with random point and shoot digital cameras and each images is only a few hundred k in size. The newer images, saved at full-resolution, may be 5Mb each.)

Otherwise I've been slowly deploying OpenLDAP in anger, which has been educational. I've got a minor problem to solve which is that (posix)group definitions don't seem to be working reliably, but otherwise I've got Apache authenticating against groups, SSH logins working, and the little brother database using the LDAP server as an address book. (Mail clients? mutt is the one true mail client. notmuchmail.org will be interesting when further developed, but everything else I'm going to ignore with my stubborn Yorkshire nature ;)

ObQuote: "Oh no no no, dead broad OFF THE TABLE!", from Shrek.

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Tagging images, and maintaining collections?

3 April 2014 21:50

I'm an amateur photographer, although these days I tend to drop the amateur prefix, given that I shoot people for cash at least once a month.

(It isn't my main job, and I'd never actually want it to be, because I'm certain I'd become unhappy hustling for jobs and doing the promotion thing.)

Anyway over the years I've built up a large library of images, mostly organized in a hierarchy of directories beneath ~/Images.

Unlike most photographers I don't use aperture, lighttable, or any similar library management. I shoot my images in RAW, convert to JPG via rawtherapee, and keep both versions of the images.

In short I don't want to mix the "library management" functions with the "RAW conversion" because I do regard them as two separate steps. That said I'm reaching a point where I do want to start tagging images, and finding them more quickly.

In the past I wrote a couple of simple tools to inject tags into the EXIF data of images, and then indexed them. But that didn't work so well in practise. I'm starting to think instead I should index images into sqlite:

  • Size.
  • date.
  • Content hash.
  • Tags.
  • Path.

The downside is that this breaks utterly as soon as you move images around on-disk. Which is something my previous exif-manipulation was designed to avoid.

Anyway I'm thinking at the moment, but I know that the existing tools such as F-Spot, shotwell, DigiKam, and similar aren't suitable. So I either need to go standalone and use EXIF tags, accepting the fact that the tags I enter won't be visible to other tools, or I cope with the file-rename issues by attempting to update an existing sqlite database via hash/size/etc.

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