[OT] Offline photo organisers with flickr publishing support

[Tim Watts]

Hi,

I'm after a system to manage my 1000's of digital photos. Key requirements are:

1) This is about organization - titles, descriptions, grouping, albums, rating - actual image editing is very *secondary* asd I can do that in GIMP.

2) Offline and good batch operations - I want my primary store local to me, not on some 3rd party web and I want to be able to quickly apply titles to a rage of photos and quickly rate each one 1-5 sort of thing.

3) Selective publishing to web[3b] - Flickr is probably my preferred choice as they have better direct links and better album (sets) than Google.

3b) Eg I would like to auto sync all my rating 4 and 5's to the web. The program should rember what is being synced and do it efficiently - so Shotwell is out.

4) Be nice if the software ran under linux, but being realistic, Windows 7 under VMWare or WINE are both acceptable.

5) No half arsed measures - I'm after something quick, efficient and stable, long term.

Picasa wasn't bad for it's offline abilities, but I prefer Flickr over Google Picasaweb and I don't trust Google not to pull the service or bugger it up long term - they have too much previous...

So far, Adobe Lightroom is looking (on paper) like quite a reasonable contender and I do not mind a £80-ish cost.

Is there anything else I might look at?

At one point, I was trying "flickrfs" - a FUSE filesystem that mapped your Flickr account into the local filesystem space so you could just use normal tools to move photos and maintain metadata. That idea really appealed - but flickrfs and everything like it is broken - these things seem to pop up, get maintainaed for 2-3 years then die. So the likes of Adobe might be a safer bet as they are not going anywhere...

Cheers,

Tim

[Adrian]

Shotwell Photo Manager. Probably in your repo.

[Theo Markettos]

I've used mapivi. It isn't particularly pretty, but:

Yes - adds IPTC info into the JPEGs (so they're just plain JPEG files, you can keep them on your HDD, back them up, etc etc). Not sure if it does RAW too (I suspect not).

There's batch ops: select 200 photos, add location of 'Paris', do it. Then go through and caption each one/few without having to fill in the location field. You can set the IPTC rating of 1-5 too, and select by rating (eg save out all the 5s)

It doesn't do that (other than making its own basic HTML) but I think you can dump files at Flickr and it'll read out the IPTC info.

Not sure if it'll do that, but since they're just JPEGs I think some other program might. You can make the basic HTML gallery though, or select all

4/5s and export them (to a directory from where something else does the sync).

It runs under Linux.

Quick: yes Efficient: yes Stable: OK as far as it goes Long term: last update 2009 Half-arsed: quite possibly

It's written in a small amount of perl, so is hackable if needs must. It's the opposite of a huge tool like Lightroom. There's no lockin - it's just JPEGs underneath.

The trouble with interfacing with Flickr, ebay, Facebook, Google etc etc is the APIs tend to change and one day everything breaks. So it's always a moving target. That's the hard bit - tagging the photos is comparatively easy (a JPEG is always a JPEG).

There's something to be said for decoupling the tagging and the upload: if one day Flickr 'does a Fotopic' (goes bust), 'does a Google Reader' (parent decides they can't be bothered any more) or 'does an Instagram' (decides that all your copyright belong to us) you want to be able to switch to an alternative service without being constrained by the support in your tagging tool.

Adobe might not be going anywhere but tried Flash on a mobile recently? (They're abandoned Android and Linux support). So core products can suddenly disappear too.

Theo

[Tim Watts]

On Tuesday 04 June 2013 12:29 Theo Markettos wrote in uk.d-i-y:

Hiya,

Rather interesting... Perl/Tk - old-skool but I can hack on that with ease...

So far it's all JPGs (and some movies) but I need a new camera sometime, so RAW might become an issue. I compared RAW against Superfine-JPG on my 2003 issue Canon G3 and there was no difference (GIMP, image subtract one from the other - a few very dark pixels were the only difference). However, for a better quality camera that could be different.

This does seem to be the sticking point. Even Flickr don't have anythig that's any good - only "uploaders" (2-way sync is a well solved problem, why haven't they done it?)

But hackable... Perosnally, I'd rate unmaintained Tk over Gtk/Qt as it might actually still be runnable in 2 years!

Cheers :)

Tim

[Tim Watts]

On Tuesday 04 June 2013 11:18 Adrian wrote in uk.d-i-y:

I've already discounted that as it cannot do proper and selective syncs to Flickr.

[Scott M]

Nope, not really. In-camera JPEG compression (and particularly on the "fine" settings) isn't excessive so there's no great colour shift or info-loss. In fact, for some the resulting file size could easily be swapped for a ZIP'd RAW. The chief advantage of RAW formats is the extra dynamic range effectively kept in the (usually) 12-bit/channel data before it's reduced to 8-bit/channel.

Scott

[cl]

I've been through this too, I don't think there's a single good solution.

I used to use digikam on my desktop to do the organisation etc. but it never *quite* agreed with my view of how the pictures should be organised.

I have now moved to jbrout, written in Python, much less big and complex than digikam (and no KDE libraries) but it does what I need - allows me to organise my pictures but leaves them in the existing directory hierarchy and keeps *all* information in the picture files.

To put my pictures on the web I 'self publish' using "Single File PHP Gallery" (see

as my home desktop is visible to the outside world. SFPG simply displays what's in the hierarchy you give it so I simply create symbolic links from the place where SFPG lives to the actual directories where the pictures are.

[Tim Watts]

On Tuesday 04 June 2013 10:23 Tim Watts wrote in uk.d-i-y:

I've just tried this (eval version) and it's actually rather good.

Watched a Youtube vid at lunchtime and I've only had to consult google twice. It's actually pretty sane - and seems very powerful.

Essentially it allows me to import photos (images files remain on their original disk location), rate them, create virtual albums from logical filters (ie Rating >= 4stars) and bind that collection to Flickr. Any changes back at base seem to propogate to Flickr.

There are plugins to publish to Facebook and for a small amount of extra money (6 quid) ones that publish to Google Services (Drive, Plus and Picasaweb).

I'm sold now even though I have to boot a VM for it - it's fairly nippy once Windows 7 has finished trashing my laptop's hard disk (it's for reasons like this that my laptop has 6GB RAM!)

Thanks for the suggestions - I did not see anything "better" (for me) than this. Just noticed I qualify for education discount so that tips the balance rather though it's not hugely expensive at normal retail for what it does.

Cheers

Tim

[John Stumbles]

...

I'm using digikam. I don't want picture information stored in the image files themselves (and that's not possible with some file formats anyway) so DK's ability and default to store in a database suits me.

It claims to export/upload pictures to flickr - I don't use it so I don't know but it does work for export to facebook. But you have to select the pictures - it won't do them automatically.

You could probably query the database and assemble a list of the pictures you want to sync from that but then I don't think you could take advantage of its built-in uploading feature.