I kind of like the light table mode of darktable for organizing. I've always been hesitant about anything uses a database or stores metadata somewhere that I cannot be sure I'll get it back from. That's what I don't like about a lot of managers.

The code at SO right now is about as far as I got. I was really lacking a "spontaneous nested loop" structure that could accommodate any number of tags per file. Perhaps it needs to do something like (complete mockup)

– for $file, tags = string
– for tags in string, mkdirs (this would be really tricky, as you need every permutation)
– in each dir, symlink the file

That's about it. I would have gone to a naming convention like file-name_[tag1-tag2-tag3].ext, so looking in between brackets would have been simple enough. I just don't know how long that would take to do. with a lot of files. SO suggestions didn't actually help all that much, either. There's some other things that do this already — you might look into them?

– Oyepa
– tagsistant

Enjoy!

I hadn't heard of Photivo before, but it looks promising… I'll have to check it out. Being cross-platform is great, and it seems that it *might* support DNG, though it's not directly stated in the feature-list.

Darktable seems nice, and also shows promise, but in my experience, it's not yet full-featured or stable enough for day-to-day work.

Your symlink script is very intriguing… i had a similar idea a while back, but never pursued it for various reasons (lack of shell-fu being one). I'll have to look back at your SO stuff, and I'd love to see your code if you're willing to share. I mainly wanted such a beast so that I could have something to point my DLNA server and PS3 at. The Year/Month/Day folder structure is fine for housing a collection, but lousy for finding photos from a keyword-blind interface.

Thanks for the comments!

I'm all for a program to be just a photo manager, and another to be just a RAW editor, so I think that helps my options. I don't have to ask a lot from F-Spot or Shotwell; just to manage. I may revisit geeqie for that, though.

I just installed rawtherapee, rawstudio, photivo, and darktable last night and played around with them for maybe 5-10min each. Photivo was very non-intuitive, but I've heard great things. Darktable looks like a direct attempt to be the Gimp equivalent to Lightroom. I've never used Lightroom, but the screencasts I've seen lead me to think that darktable looks quite similar. It even has the "snapshot" button in the upper left. They aim to be both a manager (light table) and developer arena (darkroom), which is unique.

Seems to have rapid development, so that's a plus. Rawstudio was my next favorite, and seems to have just been resurrected after about a 2 year development stagnation.

I contemplated using filenames-as-tags at one point and wrote a script to parse through all my files in a given directory and create a nested symlink structure from the tags. I'm no shell-fu expert; you can see my thoughts/request for help on StackOverflow. I never got it where I wanted it, but it did work at one point! The cool thing is that your files never have to move, so you just browse the symlink directory tree and rebuild it every so often as things change.

Anyway, glad your blog is here. Neat stuff and it's great to find other users interested in these types of things.

They both have (or will have) the capability to write keywords directly to photo files, or to external XMP "sidecar" files if desired, which should allow you to move between applications more easily, in theory. In practice, I've found no applications that will read-from and write-to ALL the different buckets (XMP, and IPTC) that are commonly used to store keyword data within the photo files, meaning switching between programs may cause your keywords to get out-of-sync.

I actually cobbled together a script that synched keyword data between multiple buckets, but I haven't maintained it. I could possibly clean it up and post it if anyone is interested, with no guarantees of utility or safety.

If DNG support on Linux gets better, I'd love to re-evaluate my options in the future, and establish a truly Linux-based workflow.

Anyway, I'm interested in this and haven't worked out my own solution yet. I've thought about just using tags or metadata to categorize somehow, but I've worried about if I lose all the metadata/effort if I switch programs. I'm planning to look into f-spot/shotwell for management, though a while ago I looked through this POST on alternatives to ACDSee and kind of settled on gqview (now geeqie). Simple viewer, but allows for tagging/metadata stuff. I never followed through and tagged my stuff, though! I just remember seeing all the others and not liking something about them.

I particularly don't really want my manager to be my editor. I just want it to do one thing well. For editing, I recently decided I'd stick to shooting RAW and ran across some plugs for Rawstudio, if you're interested. Though… I guess you're using LightRoom, so who cares what Linux has to offer in that department!

For what it's worth, I'll share two links on Linux management/editing that I just found today from the photo.stackexchange site: Linux RAW processing and Linux photo management.

Maybe add a TimeCapsule + TimeMachine (or other NAS device) for local backup, and something like JungleDisk for remote backup, and you're covered.

Three major recommendations I have are…

1) keep your buckets big: I put all the pictures Sara & I shoot in one top-level folder, and images I receive from other people (family, friends, etc) in another folder. Both of these have the sub-directory structure i outline above, however, you could get away with just a sub-folder per year. Ultimately, the directory structure is a personal choice, depending on how much fiddling you plan on doing directly with the filesystem.

2) keyword, keyword, keyword: with big buckets, your primary source of organization will be your keywords. For you, i'd recommend some top-level stuff, like "personal," "freelance," "for hire"… whatever seems appropriate. You can have Lightroom add these on import (along with IPTC metadata as appropriate). My keywording goes so far as "portrait" or "landscape" and "indoors" or "outdoors" … something that gives me things I can discretely search on to get at just the right image.

3) consistent & stable file naming incl. metadata: i love the exiflow convention. It's no replacement for proper keywording, but at least you can look at a filename and know exactly when, by whom, and with what it was taken… which is, at least, better than the off-the-camera names. In your case, you could extend that with an additional code to indicate "personal," "freelance," or "<employer id>".

in any event, glad you enjoyed the post!

The "New Guide" is super-handy as well! It wouldn't necessarily work for the cases where you're attempting to align guides after-the-fact to already created elements, but it would be fantastic as a first step, for laying down guides for a grid-based layout.

I love that you can give it values in any measurement that Photoshop understands, even percents of canvas size.

Still, I use marquee selections constantly for positioning within elements and for determining widths/distances and whatnot. The marquee would have to be the tool that is most often active in my Photoshop toolbar.

For example, I'll use a marquee to get my padding in a content box, by putting guides around the box, drawing out a square marquee to the size I want for padding, moving it to three corners, and placing guides for the interior content area of my container element as I go.