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

Yes, Image Management apps.

Posted Apr 20, 2005 2:19 UTC (Wed) by allenp (subscriber, #5654)
In reply to: Yes, Image *Management* apps. by astrophoenix
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

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

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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 (subscriber, #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.