[lug] image databases and albums

[Neal McBurnett]

OK, so I've got my new digital camera (Canon S30) and have gone
a bit overboard taking pictures of all kinds of things with all
kinds of camera settings.  And I want to do the obvious things:

  Put together a local database of pictures
  Publish web albums, complete with audio annotations where available
  Compare different pictures of the same thing to figure out
    how best to use the camera in the future.

Nautilus is somewhat useful to begin with, but doesn't seem
to let me add annotations, or search them afterwards.

jhead is good for extracting basic camera settings (EXIF format), and
for automating various imagemagick processing operations like
`convert` without losing exif data.  gphoto-exifdump (part of the
classic gphoto, not gphoto2?) provides a slightly better format for a
complete dump.
	 http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/

With some cameras you can even extract cool info like
the focussing distance to the subject.

The neatest tool I've seen so far (but haven't tried yet) is
BINS: http://jsautret.free.fr/BINS/
which does web albums complete with EXIF information.

Picture Metadata Toolkit - picturemetadata.sourceforge.net/ also looks
interesting, as does Album: http://marginalhacks.com/Hacks/album/

Other useful tools are wrjpgcom/rdjpgcom for plain JPEG comments.

Panorama Tools and PTStitcher look good for combining (stitching)
pictures together into panoramas: http://www.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch/

I've used /usr/share/doc/cthumb-4.1/ in the past and it was OK
but doesn't deal with metadata at all, I think.

But I'm still looking for something to make comprehensive image
management a bit more straightforward.  Something that lets me grab
the images, quickly run thru each one (at 50% reduction so I can see
it all) and add comments, categories and a rating, and store all that
info along with the exif camera settings.  Then later I'll want to
query the database for photo album creation and slide shows based on
the categories and ratings, etc.  Automatically integrating the audio
annotations that the S30 can capture would be great.

I think I can patch that together with the tools above, but
I'm wondering if I'm missing something else out there that
already integrates more.


Grabbing image data via a compactflash PCMCIA adaptor is perhaps 3
times faster though a bit less convenient than using
  $ gphoto2 --port usb -P --camera "Canon PowerShot S30"

The file names and filesystem times come out differently also -
gphoto2 yields upper-case file names and times that are 6 hours off.
I set my camera to MDT, and I guess that the mount command somehow
assumes that FAT filesystems are in local time, while gphoto2 assumes
they are the same as local filesystems (universal time).

But at least gphoto2 doesn't leave execute permissions on the files....

Cheers,

Neal McBurnett <neal at bcn.boulder.co.us>
http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
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