I have over 2,000 digital pictures on my computer. Most of which have made it through the trimming process; meaning I’ve deleted the duplicate, off-angle, odd light, etc. pictures and kept only the quality files. For most people that is a step beyond the norm, as they typically dump their entire camera contents into one ever growing folder. This disorganization traditionally leads to confusion, confusion takes time to correct, so in the interest of saving time people just blast each and every picture to Flickr, Picasa, Snapfish whatever… creating what I like to call the “Slide show” effect. You know what I’m talking about. Paging through someone’s digital picture album of 100 pictures only to find that 75 of them are a literal slide show of someone’s head slightly tilting, or someone walking from point A to point B, or some other minuscule action that could have been summed up with ONE PROPERLY SELECTED PICTURE!
*deep breath*
Yeah I hate that. But I digress.
Let’s get back to the root of the issue there.. disorganization. You need a way to quickly organize your photos without conjuring up your own filing, tracking, and tagging system. You need Shotwell my good friend.
Shotwell in action
Shotwell has the ability to read the meta data of each picture, allowing it to determine when the picture (or Event as it is called) took place. It then organizes your photos based on “Event” year, month, and day. This is all done automatically once you select the folder you wish Shotwell to start in. It will traverse all child directories and sniff out any pictures hidden away that you may have forgotten. You could even point the import process to your root directory (that’s the C:\ directory for you Micro$oft slaves out there) and effectively locate every single digital photo on your computer.
Once the import completes, Shotwell populates a slim SQLite3 database that will be used to store your tracking and tagging information. For the 800+ photos I selected to import this entire set-up process took less than 2 minutes. That’s 1.2GB worth of photos to crawl, index, gather meta data from, and build reference into a database. YMMV of course but this was very impressive to watch in action.
Once the set-up was complete I began tagging my photos. It works just like Facebook does.. tag someone’s name to the photo and click on their tag reference later to show all tagged photos of them. Simple.
So now you have your photos organized, you have them tagged so you can easily find your subject matter, and you may begin posting more concise digital photo albums! Death to the damned “Slide show” effect!
