Cross-platform image organizer

[ghost]

Since Google killed Picasa there's been no real good alternative to it.
You have the usual Adobe tools, but you gotta part with nearly 10 bucks a month just to get an image organizer.
You can't even buy a one-off license anymore.

Other "pro" tools are ridiculously expensive and tend to also use a subscription-style payment option.

There's nothing for an average person that just wants to organize their pictures and do some minor editing.

This tool should cover the basics like

• Support JPG and PNG images
• Cropping and 90-degree rotations
• Group photos into collections (either directly on the filesystem or something "virtual").
• Support renaming/deleting/moving photos
• Support scaling the UI so it's easy to see/read on high resolution monitors

Some extras that would be neat:

• Support RAW images
• Support viewing and editing EXIF data (like gps coordinates)
• Support scrubbing EXIF data
• Support syncing to an SMB server

[bvisness]

Yes please! This has been on my bucket list for years and years.

I wonder though how to make this appealing these days. I rarely copy photos off my phone. I wonder if there's a way to integrate with Apple/Google Photos to pull things in somewhat automatically?

Group photos into collections (either directly on the filesystem or something "virtual").

I would personally prefer to have things organized directly in the filesystem like Picasa did. If I want to send someone a photo, I don't want to open the photo software and "export" it, I want to just browse to it. That said, I think the software can be quite opinionated about the folder structure it wants. Like, it can be pretty flat...no need for any crazy hierarchy, I just want photos grouped by date.

I can imagine many extras beyond what you've listed here...I actually get a lot of value out of the map view in Apple Photos, for example. It's a lot easier to find a particular vacation photo by browsing a map than browsing by date. But I certainly wouldn't care about that right away. (Honestly I wouldn't mind if it was just an independent clone of Apple Photos...)

[ghost]

It's a lot easier to find a particular vacation photo by browsing a map than browsing by date.

Good point, that's definitely useful. Never looked into how you could embed a map into an offline application though. I'm guessing you'd probably have to put some kind of webview in there to get something reasonable in a short period of time 🤔

[akavel]

FWIW, I'm working on and off on a GUI project for browsing my archive of photos and backing them up in a chosen number of duplicate locations (https://github.com/akavel/backerrs). [Unfortunately, more off than on recently, as I had some tense months, and not so sure I started recovering yet.] Miniatures of the photos are dumped in a SQLite database. I want to add tagging, but it's not done yet.

The 2nd stage plan for this will be to allow pushing the images to IPFS and Hypercore, including e.g. some RPi-based NAS box in a closet. This would also include easy creation of "galleries" for Friends & Family to browse. I explored this idea in https://github.com/akavel/catation.