Video file support? - Githubissues

Webreaper / Damselfly

Damselfly is a server-based Photograph Management app. The goal of Damselfly is to index an extremely large collection of images, and allow easy search and retrieval of those images, using metadata such as the IPTC keyword tags, as well as the folder and file names. Damselfly includes support for object/face detection.

GNU General Public License v3.0

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Video file support? #82

Open spl opened 3 years ago

spl commented 3 years ago

Interesting project!

I didn't see it mentioned anywhere, so I wanted to inquire if Damselfly supported video files, e.g. with tags, thumbnails, etc.

Thanks!

Webreaper commented 3 years ago

No current support for videos but it's sort of in the plan for the future. It'll be low priority though, as I don't have many videos for cataloguing, and it feels like Plex, Kodi etc, are better suited and already have more investment/support.

spl commented 3 years ago

GitHub's new feature: “Video support!” Funny... 😆

spl commented 3 years ago

This is one my complaints about many (FLOSS) DAM systems: the lack of integration with images and videos. It seems to me that Plex and Kodi are meant for playing movies or series, whereas I want to keep collections of media related to particular times, events, places, etc. And that media invariably includes video. Are you aware of any good alternatives that do that?

If you don't mind, I have a few follow-up questions:

What kind of work would need to be done?
What other media types do have plans to support? As far as I've seen, DAM often refers to a general-purpose media management system. So do you have broader goals than photo management?

Thanks in advance!

Webreaper commented 3 years ago

The main work that would need to be done is support for numerous video codecs etc, plus manipulation of EXIFs. I'd also need to extend the processing support to be able to generate thumbnails for videos. None of that is particularly difficult, but it's not on my list of priorities as there's more important features I need to build for support around photos. In terms of the other question, you're right that DAM refers to management of digital assets - in Damselfly's case this is primarily photographs. I might support video in future, but I have no plans to support any other kind of media... It's primarily a photograph-management system.

spl commented 3 years ago

Thanks for answering my questions.

What about a minimum feature set of (a) metadata support (EXIF, etc.) and (b) allow downloading the video file? That is, no codec support or thumbnails. That way, video files could at the very least be included in the organization of media assets.

Lastly, since it seems you've done some research on DAMs, what's the best option for supporting photo and video in a similar way to Damselfly?

Webreaper commented 3 years ago

I've had a look - it may be possible to allow some EXIF metadata manipulation (since Damselfly uses ExifTool to do the keyword tagging, and Exiftool claims to support MP4) but it would be very limited. Supporting video without thumbnails to be able to identify the video by sight seems less useful. In terms of DAM solutions for both photos and video, you might want to look at PhotoPrism and PhotoStructure - I think they both support videos. I can't recommend more than that because I don't have a use-case for video (I use Plex, and personally, if you have a large collection I'd recommend Plex - it makes it easy to search, and download, videos).