Pictures

I'm generally a fairly messy person, but I do love organising a bunch of data.  So I've been kind of ashamed of how I've had my digital photos organised down through the years.

My pictures are all safe -- I did subscribe to the pay version of a web-based file hosting service a couple of years back, and it's some of the best money I've ever spent.  All my pictures reside there and are replicated across all my systems as a result (along with all my other key projects and documents).  But my Pictures directory has been a jumbled mess for years in terms of organisation.

I've looked at a few file organising programs, but they never seem to do exactly what I want.  So now I'm writing my own.  Features:

1. The main pictures directory will be organised into folders by year, then month.  Other organisers seem to frequently break it down into day folders, but I've always found that annoyingly granular.
2. It will be able to suck up other folders (such as dumps of camera memory cards), read the metadata off the pictures, and automatically file them correctly into this file structure.
3. It will remove duplicates, of course.
4. I've done a partial job of tagging my photos and videos using TagSpaces, which seems to me to be a pretty good standard.  Their UI is a bit clunky though, so instead I'll create a separate directory for each TagSpaces tag, containing soft links to all photos with that tag.  So I'll easily be able to, say, see all my Hamish pictures just by looking in this directory.

It's a pretty straightforward program; I knocked off probably half of it tonight, though I know I'll want to add features as I go.

I have a big box of actual prints, too, that I really should digitise, but of course they won't have the date they were taken in their metadata, so I'm not looking forward to organising them afterwards.