Feedback

[AndrewM-]

I have written an ms-access based photo manager with about 20 K lines of code. It does most of what Picty does so I can ready the list of features and appreciate why you are taking the approach you have and how much work that you have put in. I have also trawled all the open source repositories for photo manager project and possibly, Picty is the most advanced by just looking at the features set. I am attempting to migrate my application to C# dot net, so I have not downloaded and tried Picty yet but I will. The thing that I want to say is that it truly disappoints me that almost no projects have any helpful reviews or feedback, even projects that are popular, highly original or needed. My own project is about rapidly importing photos from large numbers of digital cameras after a hurricane so we can work out what is going on. It is based on my experience and observation that organisations can't handle large inflows of photos in stressful times. Yet the very people who were pointy end of the failure don't care about my project. So I do consider you project important and will review it for ideas for my own project (which will probably have an MIT license) and let you know what I think.

Cheers,

Andrew

[spillz]

Hi,

Thanks for your interest in Picty. I feel obliged point out that Picty is just one or many open source photo management apps. For instance, there's digikam, shotwell, darktable, and gthumb that are fully featured apps with bigger and more active developer bases. Picty is much less complete and in need of a UI overhaul. I continue to use it, but it really is more of a work-in-progress than those other apps. That said, the reason I continue to use it over other apps is because I wanted an app that was light-weight, good for sorting, searching and setting metadata, avoids the interoperability issues that come with using custom database schemes, and is conservative about writing data to the image files. I also wanted to write the whole thing in python because, as a scripting language with an excellent set of built-in modules, it is very easy to add new features to the core app itself or as plugins.

The thing that I want to say is that it truly disappoints me that almost no projects have any helpful reviews or feedback, even projects that are popular, highly original or needed.

Sadly, I think there's a limited audience for these types of apps, especially in the wake of cloud based photo management. Plus, Adobe completely dominates the photography software scene.

My own project is about rapidly importing photos from large numbers of digital cameras after a hurricane so we can work out what is going on. It is based on my experience and observation that organisations can't handle large inflows of photos in stressful times.

Sounds very challenging. Seems like the hard part isn't copying the photos to PC, but coming up with an efficient way to usefully catalog them. Are they already GPS tagged? How are you hoping to approach this?

[AndrewM-]

Hi Spillz, You are correct in saying that cataloging the images is the hard part. As an environmental consultant, I take up from 300-3000 photos a day and have found that traditional approaches can't handle that type of volume. So I have developed a new set of tools for doing this task. One trick is to assign categories to the keys on the number pad. That way I can move through the photos and assign a category with a single key press. With time assigning categories is based on instinct and becomes very fast. My categories are things like geology, geomorphology, ecology, flora/fauna species, [ecological] community, issue, people, etc. I have been able to create a number of cataloging methods that I have not seen in any commercial or open source systems.

I have tried the above programs, but I am in the windows world at the moment and the above are gnome based. Digicam and Darktable are also too complex for my intended audience and I want to divorce photo management from editing.

My project began when I discovered that I was failing to download about 30% of photos from my SD Cards, simple because of the effort involved in the import process and the lack of easy ways to detect photos that had not been imported. So I wrote an application that starts tracking photos when they are still on the cameras memory card. Imagine that you are in a developing country and your PC gets stolen from your hotel. I can at least recover all my photos from the large memory cards I use in my camera and GPS. These devices are almost always with me so represent an off-site backup.

Cheers,

Andrew