Re: on/offline picture management
On Sun, Dec 30, 2007 at 12:24:02AM +0200, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> On to, 2007-12-20 at 14:26 +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > Like I said, I use digiKam for picture management. That works, for the
> > most part, except for one little detail: it requires way more diskspace
> > than what I'm willing to give it on my laptop.
> >
> > So I've decided to store my pictures on my home server (which has 500G
> > of RAID1 space), and mount that using NFS. This works, except that I now
> > can no longer manage my pictures unless I'm in the same LAN as my server
> > is.
> >
> > Anyone have any better ideas?
>
> I've been thinking about the same problem. On the one hand, doing it on
> my laptop would be convenient when travelling, but on the other hand,
> disk space issues make this complicated, especially since I intend to
> take lots of pictures in the coming year. My solution is to simply not
> do any particular management of pictures while I'm not at home. I'll
> also not be doing any editing of them on my laptop, unless I really
> must: at home I have a nice, fast desktop machine that is several times
> faster than the laptop.
>
> What I'll do when travelling is to copy the pictures from memory cards
> to the laptop, and then when I get back home, to import them into
> whatever photo management software I end up using.
Well, yeah, that's basically what I'm doing now currently, too (except
that I don't copy to the laptop -- I have sufficient memory card
storage). It's just that if I do end up taking lots and lots of pictures
at some place, eventually I'll become quite backlogged; knowing myself,
that's not a very good thing (I /finally/ worked through a huge backlog
that I created by switching from f-spot to digikam; since I knew I
already had so many pictures to tag, I was reluctant to add more, so I
didn't take too many pictures since about debconf, which is a real
shame)
> (I'm still in the head-scratching stage of building my workflow.)
Heh :-)
> So I'm afraid I have no solution for Wouter. But perhaps keeping things
> simple might be the best option?
>
> If one were to use plain filesystem for photo management, using unison
> or some other two-way syncing solution might be an option, if there's
> one that allows keeping only part of the photo collection on the laptop.
> A wild idea might be to divide the photo directory by month, and keep
> each month as a separate module in a suitable version control system
> (git?) and check out only the necessary modules to the laptop?
Well, that doesn't really sound like a particularly wild idea. You don't
even have to use a separate module for each month, provided you use a
version control system that allows you to check out a subdirectory of
the repository, rather than having to fetch the whole thing.
Thing is, I don't use "plain filesystem" for photo management. It's just
not flexible enough for my needs. But then having to be at home to be
able to reasonably use digikam isn't very flexible, either. It'd be
great if digikam or some such would actually understand that I don't
want to store everything in one spot.
Speaking of wild ideas, I've started to think that a multi-user media
storage server would be a pretty neat project to code up. It would
consist of a system with much disk space and some sort of a database
system, which would then allow users to add pictures, tag them, etc; and
the system would store all the metadata it could find in the picture in
the database somehow, to allow for easy searching. Then users could use
some sort of graphical client to talk to the server. This could be done
by use of a digikam and/or f-spot plugin, really. Or just something
silly, I dunno.
When the sensible part of my brain takes over, however, I realize I've
already got way too much on my hands, so I'm not going to write
something like that.
--
<Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes.
-- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22
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