Damn, that's a lot of photos

I've begun the massive project of re-organizing my ever-growing collection of photos. It's currently a bit of a mess, split between the old point-n-shoot cameras I used to have and the SLR I use now. The old ones were more organized by subject rather than "batch", as the newer stuff tends to be.

So now, I'm re-thinking it all. The first phase is just about complete; combining the two galleries into one, and sorting them all chronologically where possible.

Next up will be to figure out a new way of getting them all online -- I may continue to use BINS, but it's showing that it doesn't scale well at all, and I don't like waiting three hours for it to go through everything just so I can add three photos. On the other hand, I want these to remain static galleries, generated offline and easily archived in a usable state. I want to be able to attach comments to galleries and specific photos too.

Then comes the fun part -- I want to whittle down the 9,500 photos that I have online into, say, 1000, grouping them by subject, and putting them up in a separate gallery, preferably by the same method as the other batches. The difference between professional photographers and people like me is that they only show their best work, and honestly most of the stuff I've taken is crap. Though the overall level of crap is improving...

The sheer scale of this endeavor eliminates most of the competition; this has to be something that I can automate from start to finish, except perhaps adding a few comments to specific images before or after the fact. BINS continues to appeal here, because it does all of this, although it is a monolithic beast, and extending it is almost as painful as pulling teeth. Combined with its scaling problem, I'm looking to jump ship to something else before I roll up my sleeves and wade back in.

So this is what I need:

• Reads EXIF data and uses it where appropriate. (timestamps, etc)
• Leaves originals untouched, except in specific cases.
• Generates static html from templates.
• Stores metadata in a human-editable format (XML barely qualifies)
• Generates thumbnails (with captions)
• Handles sub-albums (and sub-sub albums..)
• Can generate one or more scaled-down images to be used in lieu of originals, yet preserves the EXIF data. This is important for things like image copyright notices and whatnot.
• Hooks for calling external programs in the processing chain. This is particularly important for handling RAW images, which I plan to experiment with later.
• Ideally, it'll also not need to re-generate the entire hierarchy if you're just updating one section.
• Steals back underpants.

Whew. So I'm now looking into photomolo. After being quite impressed with its bundled tool exifiron, I figure I should give the rest of the suite a whirl. exifiron is a simple tool that does many wonderful things -- takes the original jpegs, strips out the thumbnails, re-compresses and orients them properly -- completely losslessly. So far I've seen approximately a 10% reduction in disk usage, which will save me two gigs of disk space if it holds.

The whole suite is based on the UNIX philosophy of a pile of little tools that does one thing well, and another tool to tie them together. We'll see how well it works.

In other news, I got my 18-70mm lens back from Nikon. I then turned around and bought a UV filter and polarizer, which has made quite a remarkable difference in the manatee porn I've been following. The reflections of the sky in the water are nearly gone. Unfortunately there's a bit of vignetting when the lens is wide open, but that's something I'll have to live with when I'm using that polarizer.

I'm also trying to get my hands on a long zoom lens. The current 70-300 that Nikon sells is crap; little more than a rebadged Tamron lens. I've been focusing my efforts on the older 70-210 f4-5.6 and the 75-300 f4.5-5.6 lenses. They're apparently quite sought after, especially the 'D' variant of the 70-210, which is going for over $400 on eBay. The others tend to be in the $200 range, which is reasonable. Having a longer zoom will be quite handy for taking pictures of wildcritters, something I plan to do a lot more of.

And the best part is that you hardly even have to leave your back yard to see some amazing things.