Image management tools [LWN.net]

Image management tools

Posted Feb 15, 2005 10:17 UTC (Tue) by ayeomans (subscriber, #1848)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor plugs in his camera

As a suggestion for your future review, could you add a check-list of some basic functions, such as:-

Thumbnail + filmstrip preview of images
Image rename based on pattern/date/time/etc
Lossless rotation by 90/180/270 degrees - including the thumbnail image in a JPEG
Lossless cropping of JPEGs
Preservation, display and editing of EXIF information
Good printing facilities, including
..standard-size templates for US and Europe paper sizes
..templates to include mixed sizes to maximise paper use
..ability to select variable numbers of different photos
..ability to arbitrarily size and position pictures on paper
Save as web page option, with thumbnails
Image correction facilities, including
..rotation and cropping
..colour correction
..red-eye removal

Including the better Windows tools such as Picasa and Irfanview in the comparison would be informative!

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Re: Image management tools

Posted Feb 15, 2005 12:55 UTC (Tue) by cantsin (guest, #4420) [Link]

You wrote:

Thumbnail + filmstrip preview of images
Image rename based on pattern/date/time/etc
Lossless rotation by 90/180/270 degrees - including the thumbnail image in a JPEG
[...]

No offense intended, but this points out for me why GUI applications get so bloated, try to do everything in one place and one app. All the functionality you describe can be easily had and is more elegantly available via the commandline toolchain of gphoto2, mmv, convert and some shell scripting syntax. [It would be nice if there existed GUIs which allowed users the same degree of chaining together small tools.] If a photo managing application would implement all the functions you propose, it would become a redundant hybrid of The Gimp and a graphical filemanager like konqueror or nautilus.

Florian

Re: Image management tools

Posted Feb 15, 2005 15:51 UTC (Tue) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266) [Link]

The thing is, photo management is a special kind of file management. It IS a hybrid of file management and photo editing. I spent a few hours yesterday sorting, rotating, cropping, resizing, and renaming photos, and I've come to the conclusion that a special tool is needed. Gimp is too generic; konqueror by itself is not enough. Some kind of in- between is needed.

I'd like to see a good add-on to Gimp that lets you open a bunch of files from the camera (or disk), rename the files according to some template (my photos are named 'YYYYMMDD-HHmm description.jpg'), rotate, crop, resize, adjust brightness/contrast/colors, save the "finished" image to one directory and the original to a backup directory (I keep all originals: these are like 'negatives': you don't crop the negative, you crop the photo). This process could be greatly automated but it's not generic functionality that belongs in EITHER Gimp nor Konqueror (or whatever file manager you use). So, yes, a special photo management app seems like a good idea. Ideally, it would re-use code from other apps, but it would still be a separate app.

Re: Image management tools

Posted Feb 19, 2005 20:28 UTC (Sat) by ayeomans (subscriber, #1848) [Link]

I agree there is risk of bloat if all these functions go into one tool.

One reason I'd love to see a checklist is to see which tools complement each other well, and which overlap so much that one is redundant.

Image management tools

Posted Feb 15, 2005 20:32 UTC (Tue) by skellba (guest, #8043) [Link]

Irfanviewer is usable under WINE and works quite well and has all tools for organizing pictures. And it can rotate jpg lossless. Speed under WINE is very acceptable (even with an old 500MHz Pentium).

Stefan Kell