Hey guys,

Today I am going to talk about my side software project for managing photos which is finally ready to be released into the wild.

The premise

I take a lot of photos with a dedicated camera. I get back home, I dump them all on the PC and I start looking at them. I delete the out-of-focus ones which leaves me with a few dozens of images, which I will keep. Now, if I want to share some photos with friends, parents, upload on Facebook, or print out, I have to go through one of the most annoying routines of my life.

  • Open an image viewer, browse through the photos.
  • For every photo that I want to share
    • Remember the name of file
    • Open a file browser, find the file.
    • Copy it to a different location

This can easily take the better part of an hour for a large collection and I always wondered how can I do it better.

Solutions

I was aware of several possible solutions to my problem, but none of them really quite fit me:

  • Abuse the delete button.
    Use your normal image viewer and press delete on the photos that you don't want to share. After you're done with selection, copy the remaining images to a new location and use the undelete function to restore the deleted pictures from the recycling bin/trash. This works, however:

    • No easy way of changing your mind. If I delete an image by accident, I have to go to the recycling bin to get it back.
    • Requires you to have trash/recycling bin enabled on the system in the first place.
    • Deleting and then undeleting is quite hacky as an approach...

  • Use an advanced image library software that lets you organize your photos in multiple collections, however:

    • They provide a lot more functionality then what I'm looking for.
    • Those can be a bit complicated to set up. (not as complicated as writing up your own damn program).
    • And most importantly, I didn't find anything that quite suited me.

So... I could continue doing things the way I always have, or try to find some application that works for me, OR code something that fits precisely my usecase.

Design

I want a simple program to select a subset of images in a folder and copy them to a different folder:

  • A basic image viewer.
  • Left and Right arrows swap previous/next image.
  • Pressing s saves the photo in the folder for selected images.
  • Pressing d allows you to change your mind and deselect an image.
  • Pressing w and e rotates the image.

This is how imageSelector was born. A cross-platform tool for selecting and organizing photos!

imageSelector 1.0 screenshots

imageSelector is GPL licensed software developed on Linux and available for Linux, Mac and Windows:

Windows users may need to install vcrun2015 if they get a dll not found error. In the future, I will provide an installer for Windows and prebuilt packages for popular Linux distributions.

I thank Martin, Lucia, Rachel and my parents for testing the initial versions, providing feedback and encouraging me to see this through and actually release it into the wild.

Run, test, share images and report issues and feature requests on github!

Nick