The Ryndex

For the amateur archivist, a digital camera is a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you take photos that you wouldn’t dare take with a film camera. After all, every additional photo is essentially free (particularly true with rechargeable batteries). You aren’t paying for film, or hard copies, and there’s no effort required to see your photos after they’ve been taken. The result is more photos. Better photos. More creative photos.

On the other hand, you take photos that you wouldn’t dare take with a film. THe result is more photos. Fuzzy photos. Ill-advised photos. Dull photos.

My rule has generally been that if I can’t be bothered to give a photograph a meaningful file name, it’s not worth keeping. I download each set of photos into a folder (named “YYYYMMDD Description”) and then go through, giving each one a title. If I can’t remember what it is (it happens) or it’s the tenth in a series of the exact same shot, it gets thrown away without regret.

It takes a lot of time, but it seems to be worth it…

The problem comes when I have a lot of photos in a short time. I don’t want to throw them away, but I’d like to have them logically named.

So here is what I want. An application that:

1. Sorts all the photos in a folder by “Date Picture Taken” (not necessarily file date!) and displays X thumbnails at a time in the LEFT side bar.
2. For all the photos in the folder, the application should be able to set the “File Creation Date” to “Date Picture Taken”
3. The currently selected picture is shown, filling the center.
4. There’s a text field below the picture, where you can edit the filename of the photo. It should make very intuitive (and mostly correct) predictions based on what I’m typing. Arrow keys should scroll through past selections. The return key makes the change.
5. It should be extremely easy to select a list and name them “eiffel_tower.jpg”, “eiffel_tower2.jpg”, “eiffel_tower3.jpg”, etc.
6. I like to name my photos all lowercase with underscores separating words. I consider this a good standard for potential web resources (keeping the clarity of distinct words, but avoiding any potential problems or confusion with spaces or file-sensitive file systems). This application would optionally enforce this rule.
7. I frequently name my photos along the lines of “location_name_interesting_feature_person_name#.jpg”. Maybe instead of renaming photos, I should be adding JPG comment fields for “Location”, “Feature”, “People” and then constructing the picture title from that (automatically adding the number). Yeah, that would be a lot of fun.
8. The application should be able to do something intelligent with photo rotation. I don’t know quite what yet, but man, that bugs me.

I’m still thinking about this. I could write this application, but I’d be much more happy using a tool that someone else wrote.