Gnome Nautilus Photo Management

Simple tools for simple photo management in Gnome

Why

Ok, all photo management software out there pretty much just sucks or is overkill and still missing the features I need. For the most part, just using Nauilus works. I can organize photos into folders, import, etc. But there are a few things missing.

1. Columns representing exif data.
2. Automated importing photos from the camera or other folder and sorting into an organized structure.
3. Simple modification of exif data.

Here are some issues I'm seeing with other projects:

1. Hyper focused on sharing versus just storing and protecting my original images.
2. No concept or clue about how many photos a typical user will have and want to manage and store. [1] I mean not a damn clue.
3. Consider dropbox a solution for anything (Seriously, this is not a backup service)
4. Have no concept of how many photos someone might have in the existing collection. And no real way to deal with this. (But have a dozen half baked ways you can get your destroyed images back from FB)

[1] I have a fairly small collection of digital photos, ~50GB and 21000 images. If we start doing family movies more regularly, as we already have a few, we'll have some TB of data to store.

The Plan

Here is the plan for doing this without getting old and grey screwing around with broken photo management programs that want to shove all my photos into a database and modify the original files! Screw you guys!

Columns representing exif data

It appears as though nautilus-columns does a nice job of this. Since this is pretty much a ubuntu thing, I'll pull it in here and modify for my own needs.

Importing photos and sorting

This will be a simple Nautils script that allows the user to right click the target folder and import the images into the directory designated in the configuration. I prefer %Y/%M as a layout in Pictures, and I could probably make this configurable at some point. Can always just move photos around at will. Event folders work just fine, since I don't have to ask permission to do so.

Simple modification of exif data

I've settled on pyExifToolGUI

As a bonus, I can use exiftool from the commandline if necessary and do some batch changes in photos.

The Future

In the future, I think I'll make a Pyramid based web interface with authentication that allows viewing of the underlying filesystem. Photos and images. This would allow private sharing for family and friends.