Plorn

Plorn: build a catalog of photo albums and the photos they contain

What's a Plorn?

A long time ago, I read a biography of Charles Dickens and was introduced to his youngest son, Edward Bullwer Lytton Dickens, named after one of Charles' best friends. For some reason, Edward was given the nickname "Plorn" by his father. For further unknown reasons, the word "plorn" stuck in my wee brain; over time, I've ended up using it for things that needed a name but I didn't know what they really were. Surprisingly, this happens a lot with software projects. And that's what happened here.

In my office is a stack of boxes collected from relatives that contain an astonishing number of photographs, some in albums, some loose, but most of them just tossed into the box. What I needed was some way to organize them all. I also needed some way to find them again whilst doing genealogical research into my family history. So, I started working on a tool to do what I wanted; since I didn't know what it was going to turn out to be or how it was going to work I ended up calling it "plorn" as I often do with such things. This time, the name stuck.

Being of a somewhat lazy nature, I tried a bunch of existing open source tools before starting on plorn. All of them had one or more of these "features" that I did not want:

• Limited, constrained or non-existent mechanisms for searching through the cataloged items.
• Limited, constrained or non-existent mechanisms to attach notes to photos or albums without modifying the photo file.
• Limited, constrained or non-existent mechanisms to assign tags to photos or albums without modifying the photo file.
• When adding photos to an album, they had to be moved to a specific location or got duplicated to some other location.

Plorn tries to avoid all these by allowing free-form text and user-defined tags to be attached to photo files that can be anywhere on the system you would like -- and then allowing you to search through all of those things. Is it perfect? Of course not. Does it do what I wanted? Mostly; there's always room for improvement.

How Does It Work?

Plorn knows how to deal with three sorts of things:

1. Albums: these are data base objects that represent a collection of photos, and can be described with some text and/or attributes. There are logical constructs, so no physical photo album is required.
2. Photos: these are also data base objects that point to an image file somewhere on your system, and can also be described with some text and/or attributes. They are not copies of the original files, merely pointers to them.
3. Attributes: these are just strings that a user defines to help when trying to find albums and photos. There are three types that you can define:
   1. Names: since the original intent was for maintaining genealogical resources, you can create any number of names to identify photos or albums.
   2. Places: similar to Names, these are meant for genealogical data to indicate where an album or photo was created. These are also defined by the user.
   3. Tags: these are just labels that can be used however you wish. A hierarchical structure can be defined, if desired.

Everything one can do in plorn is geared around manipulating one of these three things -- adding, deleting, or modifying them.

The User Interface

Caution

Whilst I designed the user interface, this is not my particular idiom¹; most of my experience has been with Linux kernel C code. My preference for a "graphical" user interface leans toward a VT100 terminal using vi. You have been warned.

The start screen contains a series of tabs, with and without buttons. Menus aren't used. Each tab deals with a particular type of object. The buttons on tabs are operations that can be performed on those objects. Here's the defined tabs:

• Albums, with these buttons:
  • info: shows what we currently know about the album
  • add: create a new album object
  • remove: delete the album from the database, including the pointers to any photos contained in the album
  • edit: change what we know about the album
  • import: add a set of photos to the selected album
• Photos, with these buttons:
  • an album pull down list to select the album photos to show.
  • info: shows what we currently know about the photo
  • add: create a new photo object
  • remove: delete the photo from the database, and from the album that contains it
  • edit: change what we know about the photo
• Attribute tabs for Names, Places and Tags, each with these buttons:
  • expand: toggle expansion of the tree hierarchy (it is collapsed by default)
  • add: add an attribute of this type
  • remove: delete an attribute
  • edit: change the attribute
• Search, with these buttons:
  • Clear: reset the search fields to defaults
  • Search: execute the search specified and produce a Search Results screen.
  • Advanced Search: similar to this tab but allow for slightly more complicated searches. This is one of the areas that needs improvement over time.
• Settings, with no buttons, just displays the current values of various configuration items found in a plorn.cfg file; these are pretty minimal at this point.

The "clever" bits in the user interface are pretty minimal: if you click on (i.e., select) an entry on the Album tab, and then select the Photos tab, the photos shown will be the ones in the selected album. Also, if you double click on an entry when viewing Search Results, an info screen for the item selected will be opened. That's about it. The whole point is to be as simple as possible.

Initial Use

There is a configuration file. For now, this file must be ~/.config/plorn/plorn.cfg. You can see the contents of this .ini style file in the Settings tab mentioned above. There is no need to create this file; it will be created on first execution of plorn if it does not already exist.

Similarly, an SQLite data base is created on initial startup. Its location is given in the configuration file, but defaults to ~/.local/share/plorn/plorn.db. Note that ~/.local/share/plorn is also used by default to store thumbnail images of the photos

Changing File System Locations

If you want to have the data base to be somewhere else, start up plorn once then exit it. Next, move the directory ~/.local/share/plorn to wherever you would like it to be; again, note that image thumbnails will also be stored in this directory. Finally, edit the configuration file to show the new path in data_dir and optionally change the dbname value to change the name of the data base itself.

For now, the configuration file needs to stay in the same location. If there is a plorn.cfg file in the current working directory, it will be used instead.

If you open an editor and create the file ~/.config/plorn/plorn.cfg (or ./plorn.cfg) you can acheive the same goal, as long as it looks something like this:

[plorn]
user = myusername
full_name = My Full Name
config_dir = /my_configuration_file_directory
data_dir = /my_plorn_data_directory
dbname = my_db_name.db

Licensing Information

All Python code for the Plorn project is:

Copyright (c) 2026, Albert H. Stone, III <ahs3@ahs3.net>

and is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 3 or later².

The file plorn_app.png is a copy of a photograph from the Charles Dickens Museum, 48-49 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LX, England. It was originally found on Victorian Web. The image was also used in the book Charles Dickens: Dickens' Bicentenary 1812-2012³. The photograph in the book was taken circa 1868 and is of Charles Dickens' son, Edward "Plorn" Dickens when he was about sixteen years old. Ownership is unclear; the Charles Dickens Museum, who is credited with providing the picture used in the book, does not know where this picture is currently and says they may or may not have it. Ms. Hawksley, who is also a member of the Museum, said I should ask the museum about re-use of the photograph -- who in turn pointed me to Ms. Hawksley. Given the age of the original, it is most likely in the public domain, but I cannot prove or disprove that. The photo is only used in one place and may easily be replaced (see PLORN_PHOTO_PATH in the file plorn_config.py) if this becomes an issue.

The red X icon used in the search results (checkbox.png) is from:

https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/incorrect
Incorrect icons created by heisenberg_jr - Flaticon

The green check mark (tick mark) in the search results (red-x.png) is borrowed from the Linux Mint desktop icons and is distributed under the terms of GPL-3.0-or later, as is this project.

The plus and minus icons used when adding or removing attributes (files list-add.png and list-remove.png) are borrowed from the GNOME project, and are re-used under the terms of GPL-3.0-or-later, as is this project.

Footnotes

1. Thank you, Monty Python. ↩

2. See the file COPYING. ↩

3. Charles Dickens: Dickens' Bicentenary 1812-2012, Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, copyright 2011 Lucinda Hawksley, Insight Editions, San Rafael, California, ISBN 978-1-60887-052-3. See page 35. ↩