[wellylug] Databasing and Annotating pictures under Ubuntu8.10

Jeff Hunt jeffhunt90 at gmail.com
Sun Mar 15 09:34:34 NZDT 2009


Using Ubuntu 8.10 I have a problem.
My wife is a professional picture librarian archivist and wants to
keep our personal photos stored, documented and accessible to a high
standard. This should be trivial, but I cannot get close to an
adequate solution.

If I search on databasing pictures I get software that simply tags
photos with a few keywords, is incompatible with other software and
has a whole lot of daft extras such as editing the picture. (Why not
use Gimp or simpler editors)

So I am using a mixture of F-Spot, Nautilus and then a Python program.
I wrote myself to get the naming the way she wants it Date -
sequencial number - photographer initials - base name and of course
suffix (20090326005 JM My_holiday.jpg)

She then adds copious notes to the Nautilus notes tab - which are
unsearchable except by a text search in a hidden folder. The
tantalising other data tabs are inaccessible.

Even with this limited approach a number of things go wrong...

F-Spot is wonderful for downloading the camera and putting pictures in
identifiable directories but childish for anything further.
Nautilus is great for graphical interface but does not allow access to
most photographic data and has the alarming ability to lose associated
data (notes) if you move the photo using anything but grahical
Nautilus (Try adding a note to file 'test'. Open a terminal and issue
" mv test test1 " and then check for the note) Equally alarming it
appears to be impossible to reattach the note other than by a
graphical cut and paste from the .nautilus/metadata folder.

I cannot find any list of Nautilus commands to cause a mv (move /
rename) to happen from the terminal or a Python program. In fact
Nautilus appears to be undocumented in the places I have looked.
Surely there must be a command such as "Nautilus_rename test test1"
but where do I find it? I confess I am emailing you guys first before
searching the Nautilus site carefully.

Related to the last point, backing up is very harrowing because of the
risk of detaching file info from the file. I still have to research
this.

I have considered writing my own xml data file and storing it in the
photo folder where it can be tracked and backed up but I would only be
adding my own dysfunctional software to what's out there.

Most of our pictures are jpg's which are supposed to have built in
additional data but it appears to be very hard or impossible to access
and not all pictures are jpg's and it would be nice to extend this to
all files. I want general databasing and annotating capabililty, not
an extended mishmash of software to do a small part of the job.

We have a family member who is a professional Drupal author and he has
shown the wife a working display of pictures and thumnails and
something called 'authority files' which are the author, date etc,
that impressed her  - but using software of this size to name, view
and document a personal picture and file collection seems overkill and
if there are any deficiencies such as modifying bulk sequential naming
then I may be back where I started.

Anyone out there know the answer? This is 2009, it should be automatic
by now and possibly is if I look in the right place.

If anyone wants a Python program that reads a directory alphabetically
and numbers and adds base names which can be changed as it goes by
either regular expression or sequence count of the originals then I am
your man. You will lose any notes written on Nautilus though.

Thanks  to everyone who helped out with my friend wanting a host
internet site for a start up company. Much appreciated.



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