Yes, Image *Management* apps. [LWN.net]

Yes, Image Management apps.

Posted Apr 18, 2005 21:41 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

So, how well do they *really* scale?

My collection has grown to well over 10,000 photos (21 gigs!), and is currently growing at about a gig a month. That's what I mean by scaling.

I also need the ability to publish stuff online, and keep the two in sync.

And let's not forget about web-based apps. While there are a lot of "online gallery" tools, only a handful are really designed to manage images as opposed to "share photos" or whatnot.

I ended up settling on Photo Organizer, (http://www.k-i-s.net) which is web-based and uses PostgreSQL as its backend. Its feature set is modeled after commercial image management tools that professional photographers use.

The feature which sold me on it was the distinction it makes between folders of images, and albums, which are arbitrary views into these folders. An image resides in one folder, but can be displayed in any number of albums. This makes it easy to create categorical views.

Another added benefit is that since it's a [real] SQL database on the backend, you can do some truly insane things with bulk updates and other advanced queries. Nevermind the benefit that an app crash won't hose your metadata backend.

Unfortunately, I've had to make so much use of the SQL backend because PO's current interface for bulk updates is crummy to non-existant -- but that's the main feature slated for the next release. (...along with a pile of other stuff I've added or fixed to satisfy my own itches)

It's worth a look.

(Log in to post comments)

Yes, Image *Management* apps.

Posted Apr 20, 2005 2:19 UTC (Wed) by allenp (guest, #5654) [Link]

I wonder how many hackers got cameras a few years ago and started work
immediately on a tool to sort the images?

I've got about 13,000 images and about 3000 lines of perl/Tk to manage
them. The image database is an XML file that's now up to about 1.5M.
My ImageTool script takes about a second to start, and most of that
is spent creating the GUI. A query that will return the entire database
has the thumbnail view filled in less than five seconds. Smaller queries
are much faster because they only hit the disk for thumbnail display.

The big problem is to keep up with the tagging. I've had some sort of
tagging capability for about two years, but I've still got piles of
images that have yet to be tagged.

I'd like to thank the grumpy editor for a great conversation-starter. The
two features I see here that I haven't thought to implement are batch
rotation and searching by EXIF date. Another feature I've got on my list
is the ability to email reduced versions of a selection of images to
friends. The free Google tool does that, I think.

I've always intended to release my ImageTool at some point if it ever
stabilized. With so many strong competitors already out there, I may
just keep it to myself. :-)

Paul Allen

Yes, Image *Management* apps.

Posted Apr 20, 2005 14:16 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> I wonder how many hackers got cameras a few years ago and started work
> immediately on a tool to sort the images?

Looking at Freshmeat, I'd wager quite a few. :)

>I'd like to thank the grumpy editor for a great conversation-starter. The
>two features I see here that I haven't thought to implement are batch
>rotation and searching by EXIF date.

Have a look at _exifiron_, part of the _photomolo_ suite. Its purpose is to, well, iron out the images, performing (completely lossless) rotation including updating the EXIF data to reflect the new orientation, strips out EXIF thumbnails, and adjusts the file timestamps to reflect the EXIF timestamp. Oh, and losslessly recompresses the images to use less space -- On average, it's shaved about 10% of the file off. When you're talking about 10K images or so, that space savings really adds up (two gigs in my case!).

> I've always intended to release my ImageTool at some point if it ever
> stabilized. With so many strong competitors already out there, I may
> just keep it to myself. :-)

Oh, you know it'll never be "stable". :) And you never know who else will pick up the ball.

Yes, Image *Management* apps.

Posted Apr 22, 2005 2:03 UTC (Fri) by allenp (guest, #5654) [Link]

> Have a look at _exifiron_ ...

Yep. I use exifiron for lossless cropping, rotation, or both.
I've fiddled with jpegtran as well, and can't remember what
I've ended up using for what. :-)

>> I've always intended to release my ImageTool at some point if it ever
>> stabilized. With so many strong competitors already out there, I may
>> just keep it to myself. :-)

>Oh, you know it'll never be "stable". :) And you never know who else will >pick up the ball.

When it's stable enough that someone who's unfamiliar with the
code (and may not be a coder) can install it and get it to do
something useful, I'll release it. I get lots of interest
whenever I describe what I'm doing, so I know I'll have no
shortage of beta testers.

Paul Allen

Yes, Image *Management* apps.

Posted Apr 22, 2005 13:54 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

>Yep. I use exifiron for lossless cropping, rotation, or both.
>I've fiddled with jpegtran as well, and can't remember what
>I've ended up using for what. :-)

jpegtran has issues with every digicam I've owned.. it always left a strip on the side of the image unless I used the --trim option. So I ended up getting a lossy rotation. I was rather happy to discover exifiron got it right.

Yes, Image *Management* apps.

Posted Apr 19, 2005 11:22 UTC (Tue) by Luud (subscriber, #21831) [Link]

Hi pizza,

Yes, I like PO too. Currently I'm working with Balint (the PO developer) to create a bulk upload feature that works from the command line. I've also got about 10000 fotos to enter into the database, and my webserver will not be able to cope with that through http.

Also, Balint is now working hard on the bulk update feature. So you can expect that in the next version.

I'm quite interrested in your user tools. Maybe it is a good idea to let Balint know what you are doing with them. I've found him to be very open to other peoples ideas.

As far as scalability goes for gthumb. It works very good for me on handling collections of up to 3000 fotos at a time in a directory tree. Renaming goes fine, although there is one feature they should better turn off: when typing in the new name in the rename series dialog, it kan take quite a while before your screen gets updated when there are lots of images to rename.

Cheers,
Luud

Yes, Image *Management* apps.

Posted Apr 19, 2005 15:26 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

I've been trading e-mails with Balint, and I am looking forward to the bulk update interface. I ended up coding up a few hack-ish things to get me by in the mean time though... but I'm also comfortable with SQL, so I do even more directly to the database...

As far as bulk uploads.. I feel your pain. It took me nearly three weeks to get all of mine uploaded in roughly 100 meg batches. Of course if I hadn't cared about things like setting the location and whatnot, it would have gone faster. That lack of a bulk update feature, ya see...

But I couldn't wait for the next release. I was already four months behind getting stuff posted (I was using BINS, and it just couldn't scale.. so I'd need an image management app to manage BINS..) so I fired up emacs and started hacking on the PO codebase.

Balint's accepted the majority of my patches, though he hasn't got back to me yet on the last one. (http://www.shaftnet.org/po/ if you want to see what I've done so far)