Lack of Clarity
Clarity, as a practical use project, has partially succeeded from a technical standpoint and has failed from a practical perspective. The idea was that it would be a sort of super-curated photo blog, but the practical side was that it basically served as an ersatz photo library that didn’t naturally insert itself into my workflow to maintain and update. It also did a terrible job of scaling the original photos, which was probably more of a “me” problem, but since it’s a “me” app this is a big problem.
I’ve designed and started assembling/coding a system that generates exported HTML photo libraries based on the photos we star in Picasa. That sounds like the kind of system that might actually work for me. Picasa and I are always kind of on the edge of breaking up, but depending on Picasa stars to generate public photo albums would probably stick us together for a long while.
Our issue, which goes far beyond the scope of the photo gallery project, is that our 2012 and onward (post-DSLR) photos are currently organized in a Claire-centric fashion. As cringe-worthy to the data-head as this might be, it actually made sense at the time to name folders things like “Fifteen Months Old” and “Halloween.” I almost need to revoke my weekender computer scientist status for failing to consider what I would name the folder with the second year of Halloween photos, let alone what to do with multiple children’s timelines.
It’s bad enough for the above reasons, but these names also don’t alphabetize and therefore would wreak havoc on any kind of auto-generating sequence of photo albums. So I have to go back and re-sort everything into month-based folders with YYYY.MM prefixes, which thanks to my default “N Months Old” structure will require splitting every single folder into two folders, with overlaps for almost every month. Plus special events get broken out and photos from other cameras get woven in.
In addition to post-DSLR and merged family photos, we have the gigantic turd that is iPhoto maintaining its own library of iPhone photos and all our travel photos from Turkey from the old point ‘n’ shoot, all in a semi-locked format that needs to be busted up and merged into our indexed system. Afterwards I will burn iPhoto with fire and never look back.
Plus, we have annotated, curated Picasa Web Albums – oh wait, I mean Google+ Photos! – libraries with aforementioned photos from Turkey, that are in the process of being exported from Google and hopefully merged into all this as well.
When it’s all done (which despite the troubles honestly won’t take that long), we’ll start using Amazon Glacier to do the “what if there’s a fire” level of backup, and everything will btsync throughout the household for a distributed, harmonized backup copy. Then, my Raspberry Pi will read the .ini files Picasa drops into the folders and copy/symlink the starred photos into a library export staging location, after which Sigal, likely modified somewhat, will blast all this exported, curated stuff into HTML pages and serve via subdomain from the house.