[sf-lug] Fwd: What do you people use to organize your photos both locally and on the web?

jim jim at well.com
Sun Feb 6 08:03:43 PST 2011


    wow! i usually sneer at software as being too 
bloated, but this stuff seems interesting. 
    NeXTSTEP came out with a color wheel, i can 
see using that to specify colors, which would go 
a long way. i visual classes are coarse, then 
rock, person, dog, tree, probably as tags, could 
be mapped to images. 
    i make it a point not to have much stuff, so 
flatfiles work great for me. still and all, i 
have to work with others who have tons and tons 
of stuff, pics, vids, various types of docs, all 
in big numbers. 
    the bill/dog issue comes up a lot. i dislike 
the default ~/{Pictures,Videos,Documents...} 
subdirectories and favor ~/{Vacations,Sports,...} 
and mainly specific project names for subdirectories, 
each of which has related vids, sound, image, 
diagram, text, document... and other files per 
the event or focus. 

 




On Sat, 2011-02-05 at 21:02 -0800, Brian Morris wrote:
>  I recently learned a little about neural net image classification
> methods.
> 
> there is a test / training data set consisting of thumbnails of
> animals, and they got pretty good result asking "which animal is
> it" (at least 50 kinds to choose from, maybe more).
> 
> one guy in the ML Noisbridge group tried a little facial recognition,
> says its hard,
> 
> so I am not sure you could distinguish Bill as such but you could
> place him in the category "human" and your dog in the dog category OK
> 
> to run the training might take a long time but if you have a decent
> GPU (say from the last couple of years) it could run 20 times faster.
> The example I saw it was like 30 days vs 24hours, was probably high
> end GPU; but people with 2008 MacBookPro have gotten 15x speedups
> almost as good.
> 
> So for this method we presume you already have a folder structure
> which you are adding to or picking from. 
> 
> If you want to play, 
> 
> for unsupervised clustering the SOM toolkit which will produce  a 2-d
> visualization of fuzzy boundaried many-dimension clustered groups from
> unclustered data.  Given some starting point there are refinement and
> extension methods for that. This is not neural net but well studied
> algorithm that's been around a long time.
> 
> In many clustering methods supervised or not, you specify how many
> clusters you want, you do not have to separate out everything in the
> world. You choose how finely grained you want it, so you can expand
> the categories as your  collection grows. 
> 
> If you do heirarchical clustering then you can have the file system
> tree structure. Honestly I haven't thought too much about the higher
> dimensions or the cross-linking references, however I believe that
> these are equivalent. 
> 
> The problem for me with flat files is it gets messy, or at least hard
> to find things. Honestly though that old program I use is flat
> (sequential) except you are allowed labels and you can sort by date,
> name, type, etc.; unless otherwise you start adding keyword tags.
> However it uses its own internal db so you are free to do a file
> system folder system of your own as well independently, which it scans
> *and* includes in its db.  The catalog files are not large, and the
> program is fast on old computer. At least you have those options and
> flexibility although you do most of the organizing by hand I find it
> fairly useful, but it is definitely 1990s (production, not research)
> technology - not 'smart' in any real sense. If you want to cross-file
> you can have multiple catalogs of the same stuff and you can drag and
> drop item selections between catalog windows. 
> 
> 
>  
> 
> On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 7:58 PM, jim <jim at systemateka.com> wrote:
>         
>            assume some way of working directly with images
>         rather than with tags. what would be the difference
>         between bill and dog? 
> 
> They don't look the same. 
> 
>  
>         assume some distinctions. to
>         use them, you're gonna have to learn them, a whole
>         vocabulary that will distinguish between red balls
>         and plaid blankets and will describe every kind of
>         rock, pebble, leaf, scraps of paper and plastic....
> 
> You can tell them apart easily enough, but fine distinctions usually
> mean you have some special interest.  They don't always require names,
> I can distinguish many colors and sort them without needing names for
> them all, nor do I need descriptions only relative comparisons, some
> way of organizing or structuring the items themselves.
> 
>  
> 
>            i'd rather use tags, but i like mid-twentieth
>         century technology such as flat files, which are
>         simple and take little storage.
>         
>         
>         
>         
>         On Sat, 2011-02-05 at 18:02 -0800, Brian Morris wrote:
>         > [whoops forgot the list]
>         >
>         > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>         > From: Brian Morris <cymraegish at gmail.com>
>         > Date: Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 6:01 PM
>         > Subject: Re: [sf-lug] What do you people use to organize
>         your photos
>         > both locally and on the web?
>         > To: Akkana Peck <akkana at shallowsky.com>
>         >
>         >
>         > Keywords created flat files which I don't like much, seems
>         like a
>         > (mid) 20th century technology.
>         >
>         > I have an "Asset Management" program in Mac that is ageing /
>         ailing
>         > but really helps a lot, I do wish there was an open source
>         replacement
>         > (the newer versions of this program I don't like expensive
>         bloatware).
>         >
>         > Even with the program I stilll use file/folder system, I
>         like to
>         > experiment with organizational schemes, but I only use a few
>         aliases
>         > here and there. I have found that most people are challenged
>         to think
>         > clearly in two dimensions never mind three -- we mostly live
>         in two
>         > dimensions unless we are pilots.
>         >
>         > I would like to have some running software that assists me
>         in
>         > classifying / reclassifying things. I have some toolkits but
>         barely
>         > prototypes. I'd be interested in working with others on a
>         hacking
>         > project maybe. My desire here at this point not to gui but
>         to have
>         > graphical presentation of results and some command line
>         features. This
>         > should be scriptable / hackable. Given a current
>         representation of
>         > some kind, the program could perhaps present the user with
>         some
>         > feedback or assist in further filing.
>         >
>         > Certainly if I had some better tools my life in Linux would
>         be
>         > expanded, I would want the tools to be cross platform though
>         still and
>         > cloud solutions for me are out of the question.
>         >
>         > What I would really like (dream) is software that could work
>         directly
>         > with images rather than relying (exclusively) on textual
>         tags. This is
>         > not impossible, but for practical purposes I think it
>         requires some
>         > (General Purpose) GPU programming ie OpenCL, which is an
>         emerging
>         > technology I hope to become involved with.
>         >
>         > Long story short -- getting real tired of twentieth century
>         (soft)
>         > technology.
>         >
>         >
>         >
>         > On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 4:44 PM, Akkana Peck
>         <akkana at shallowsky.com>
>         > wrote:
>         >         Mikki McGee writes:
>         >         >    After looking at what was available, I decided
>         to do it
>         >         all "my way."
>         >         > I collect art pictures from museums, and pictures
>         of
>         >         specimens of a
>         >         > diverse group of living things; and so I upload
>         into a
>         >         directory called
>         >         > /CAMERA, and sort and edit and same into, for
>         example,
>         >         > /Art/Legion/Statuary.    Or
>         >         into /Arthropoda/Insecta/Lepidoptera,
>         >         >    or into /Pictures/Friends.
>         >
>         >
>         >         I tried that, but it got complicated and I gave up
>         -- if I
>         >         have a
>         >         photo that has my friend Bill and his dog, do I put
>         duplicate
>         >         copies
>         >         in Images/People/Bill and Images/Animals/Dogs? Put
>         the pic in
>         >         one
>         >         place and symlink to the other place?
>         >
>         >         I organize photos in directories by year, and within
>         each year
>         >         I
>         >         just make descriptive names for upload directories,
>         like
>         >         Images/2011/RSA-baby-quail if I went on a hike at
>         Rancho San
>         >         Antonio where I saw a lot of baby quail.
>         >
>         >         Then each of these directories has a Keywords file
>         (just a
>         >         text file,
>         >         keyword: file1.jpg file2.jpg ...) and I have a
>         script that can
>         >         search recursively for keywords.
>         >
>         >         I know, you're probably thinking, "What a lot of
>         wasted
>         >         effort!
>         >         [insert favorite big bloated Gnome app or
>         proprietary app] can
>         >         do
>         >         all that and has a GUI too!" And probably you're
>         right. But
>         >         with
>         >         my way, I can change my filing scheme or the way I
>         access
>         >         keywords
>         >         at any time, I can copy any subset of my images to
>         another
>         >         machine
>         >         (any platform) at any time, and I never have to
>         worry about
>         >         how
>         >         to migrate a database if the program ever stops
>         being
>         >         maintained or
>         >         changes its UI in a way I don't like. There are some
>         >         advantages to
>         >         the old-school text file approach.
>         >
>         >                ...Akkana
>         >
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