Because of a little “issue” with Bibble which causes that software to cease responding when navigating the browser whilst it is updating the icons, I had to come up with a different way of storing my raw images. Or at least a different “shadow view” that would allow Bibble to work more reliably. I had been thinking on what would be the best way (for me!) of doing this for a while now, and this morning spent about 45minutes knocking up some code to do what I wanted.
I chose to use the “date” contained within the Exif information within each file to produce a directory structure along the lines of “/some/place/YYYY-MM-DD/original-name-of-file” with the file at the bottom level being a symlink back to the original file. I chose not to move any files around as I could more easily fix things if the code I had written did Something Stupid. I chose not to copy any files, as I did not want to duplicate some 100Gbytes of RAW files if I did not need to — and I did not as symlinks can do the job perfectly well.
As for the choice of the date format, well I have long preferred the ISO date format in places where a conventionally human readable date was not necessary or would be inconvenient. The ISO date format is useful in that it is not subject to misinterpretation as date formats such as “DD-MM-YY” and “MM-DD-YY” are, and it happens to sort easily with the ls command – which is much more useful than you would think. If it looks a little odd, just start using it and get used to it.
The code itself is available here if you really want to get hold of it (I wouldn’t bother if I were you – it’s just something knocked up in a rush that works ok for me).
The interesting thing about the new “repository” was that it was easy to produce a table of dates and the number of photos taken on those dates :-
cd /media/photos/raw.dated for i in $(echo *) do echo -n "$i "; ls $i/* | wc -l done
The output is long enough and boring enough (for anyone other than me) that I will not include it here. But it is relatively easy to turn this into a graph using ploticus :-
ploticus -prefab chron \ -o photos.png \ -png \ data=dates.dat x=1 y=2 \ datefmt=yyyy-mm-dd \ color=blue \ echodata=no \ xinc='1 year' \ stubfmt='MMM YY'
This produced a graph similar to :-
I seem to be taking more photos over time.