What I do with images
Saw a short piece by Garrett LeSage, What do you do with your images?, over at Planet Gnome about F-Spot (an image manager for gnome) where he asked how others worked with their photos, and what he could do to make F-Spot aid in that.
Now I haven’t used F-Spot but it got me thinking. What do I do with my photos? What do I want to do, and how?
I take a lot of pictures, and so far I’ve been managing them the traditional way (if that term is applicable to digital photography at all) using a fairly simple directory hierarchy, ~/images/<year>/<occasion>/.
This makes it fairly simple to locate photos from a specific occasion, I just have to remember what year I took them.
However, finding pictures based on anything but the occasion and shooting year is quite inconveniently. For instance, to locate a picture of a friend of mine I’ll have to manually scan through the entire collection until I find what I’m looking for. Lets get back to that problem in a minute, there’s something else I want to talk about first.
Quite often I publish some of the photos from each occasion on my gallery website. When doing so I first go through the files selecting the ones I want to publish. Then I upload them, add them to the database and start the generation of smaller sized versions of each file. Finally I log on to the gallery site and write comments for most, if not all, photos. While doing so I also assign some other meta data, such as which persons are present in the picture, to each file. This usually takes a few minutes but it’s well worth it, and most of the time I can persuade someone else to do the meta data and comment writing for me 
Now lets get back to the problem I had finding a specific picture. With the meta data in the gallery database it’s possible to search for a specific meta data key, such as the name of a person, or a combination of several keys, such as “give me all pictures of person A standing, on a beach, next to either person B or C.”.
The problem here is that the meta data is only available in the gallery database. And on the gallery website I don’t have all of my images. So I end up having two separate systems having, mostly, the same data, but with a few discrepancies.
What I would like is to be able to synchronize, not only the photos, but also all meta data between the two systems.
So that I can see, in F-Spot for each photo:
- If is published on the gallery site
- It’s meta data
- Comments from me and others
To summarize this - rather long - story; what I would like to see is the following:
- A way to import and export meta data in a common, well defined, format. Not just EXIF or such.
- A ‘upload to gallery’ function that would execute a custom command when invoked.
- A way to set emblems based on meta data.
