Looking for a Picture Management Program#

[Chris G]

On Sun, Jul 06, 2008 at 07:07:46PM -0400, H.S. wrote:
> Chris G wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Are you suggesting that I tag images with their date or what exactly?
> > 
> > For example if I want to see pictures/images for, say, October 1987
> > how would I tag them so that I see that in October 1987 I have images for:-
> > 
> >     The horses in the orchard
> >     Holiday in Venice
> >     Maxine for publicity
> > 
> > ?
> > 
> 
> I think you are probably looking for a picture or photo management tool 
> which has database functionality in it. For this, the tool should either 
> come with a "lite" version of a database server in it or it should be 
> able to talk to a database.

As far as I know just about all the reasonably serious image
management programs already *do* use a database.  Digikam certainly
does and so does f-prot I believe.

>                             I haven't looked at this much, but looks 
> like your best bet is going to be a web interface tool for picture 
> management. Take a look at zoph, for example (never used it though, but 
> apt-cache came in handy).

I suspect it will be too slow even with the web server running on the
same computer.  E.g. looking at the Zoph documentation it says "If you
are going to be importing directories of photos you will probably need
to increase the size of max_execution_time in php.ini. The default is
30 seconds but you will probably need this to be a couple minutes or
more, depending on how many images you import and how fast your
computer is."  I regularly import directories of hundreds of images,
it's pretty quick in digikam but going to a web server is going to be
horribly slow I suspect.

> 
> Now, a different way of achieving what you want (without *you* having to 
> do much as opposed to creating your own naming system as I described in 
> an earlier reply of mine) is to make the file system aware of meta data 
> of files. This way you can sort your files (photos) based on their date 
> of creation or modification or location or topic, all of which should 
> appear in the file's metadata. I do not know much about how this is all 
> done in Linux, but apparently ZFS is capable of doing this ... but take 
> this claim of mine with a grain of salt.
> 
This only helps if the image management program is able to use the
sorts provided by the file system, I doubt if any are able to do this
because they would become dependent on a particular file system.

-- 
Chris Green