Fast Digital Image Retrieval in Various Storage Locations

Every ambitious photographer is familiar with the problem: your image collection not only grows way too fast, it is also distributed among various storage locations by using online photosharing services or mobile devices. Most of the current photo management tools in the market only care about the images saved directly on your computer, whereby users lose sight of a great number of images pretty fast. The software project ‘picurl‘, sponsored by the Internet Private Foundation Austria, focuses on this issue.

Manage images storage-independently
Picurl is a photo management tool for Windows and Linux, which is operated by means of a command line application. First of all the user tells the program, which storage locations and online services are used for saving photos. From there on picurl automatically creates preview thumbnails, which also hold the complete EXIF and IPTC-metadata of the original images.

By means of a savvy way of indexing – each picture only uses a few kilobytes of data for the transfer – the user gets a pretty fast overview of his entire but distributed photo collection. Looking up a certain photo does not demand trusting your eyes: with its metadata-search picurl is able to filter even huge photo collections by tags, the date of a shot and many aspects more.

Even when working with original images picurl offers some nice features: arbitrary copying from and to all storage locations is made possible. For instance, the photos stored on an FTP-server can be added to a ‘flickr.com’ album fully automatically. Up to now users do have to operate quite a number of programs to fulfil this task.

The freshly released version 0.0.3 is already able to manage digital images in local stores (such as hard disks), on USB flash drives, memory cards used in digital cameras, as well as FTP and web servers, photo albums published on ‘flickr.com’. A plugin-architecture ensures the implementation of additional photo services and stores later on.

Open standards instead of metadata-mystery
Not only its storage-indpendent concept but also the consequent use of standardized data structure makes it a stunning idea: picurl saves image-based metdadata directly to the IPTC or EXIF-headers of the auto-generated thumbnails. Information about collections are packed into RSS-feeds. That’s how third-party-software can in fact access the data contents of picurl – without lengthy prior export in any way.

This feature is intended to bring back some freedom to the users and tidy up the metadata-mystery of Flickr, Picasa and others. In this regard Mr Franz Buchinger, the project founder and head developer of the picurl team, says: "The export functions of photosharing platforms are absolutely imperfect. Downloading entire photo collections is only offered by a few services, and that’s where in addition tags and other metadata are out of the game." The need for a time-consuming and complex new tagging-effort would be the result.

That’s where picurl comes in handy: when images are being indexed on ‘flickr.com’ (one of the most famous photosharing-services on the web) tags, picture names and copyright information are automatically converted into EXIF- or IPTC-data records. Nearly all photo management applications do understand these pieces of information and assure a ‘waterproof’ transfer of image metadata. Combing through your entire photo collection is easily achieved within a single program – your local webbrowser.

Mobile photo collections including visual bookmarks
The picurl software comes without the need for separate installation and doesn’t even demand administrator rights to be executed. That’s what makes it a real ‘stickware’ – it runs directly from the USB flash drive or even a digital camera (mass storage device mode required). With picurl it is no problem at all to carry around a managed collection of thousands of digital images on a single USB flash drive, as each photo only takes about 25 Kb of available storage space. As an innovative additional feature the auto-generated preview thumbnails offer a handy shortcut to the original saving location and – on demand – carry out the download fully automatically.

"That’s what we call ‘visual bookmark’. When you wish to download the original image, you don’t have to remember the web address of an item for instance", the developers of picurl explain. For this feature the user doesn’t necessarily need to work on the shell (terminal). By request the software is being integrated in the contextual menue of numerous filemanagers, such as Windows Explorer, Nautilus or Konqueror.

Fast update policy and power-driven performance
Picurl was developed in the popular scripting language Python and benefits from its ‘batteries included’ philosophy. A rich pool of system libraries ensures for an increasingly faster implementation of new features compared to higher programming languages. But also the program’s own performance is quite impressive. On a computer, on which the searching process among 11.000 photos of 20 different camera types within Windows Explorer needed 70 seconds, picurl was able to fulfil this task by using the mentioned system libraries in just 28 seconds.

Status and prospects
The newly released version picurl 0.0.3 is not yet intended as a tool in real-world circumstances, but addresses itself to power-users willing to test software connected with digital photography and image archiving. "Open source tools, such as ‘Gimp’ or ‘ImageMagick’ benefit from their high popularity for years now. That’s why we are pretty sure that picurl too will arouse lively interest in the users", the software developers state. At the same time they kindly ask for feedback via their mailing list on www.picurl.org: "Being a fairly young software project picurl really needs bug-reports, ideas for improvement or general comments." For the moment the software runs on Windows as well as Linux. A version for Mac OS X and a webservice is currently under development.

In October of 2007 the project’s initiators gained a sponsorship in the Austrian web idea contest called ‘Netidee’ launched by the Internet Private Foundation Austria. This makes it possible to finance the current development activities of the team. Thomas Kraetschmer, responsible for marketing and graphical appearance of picurl, states about the project: "As developers in this corner of the software universe we make extensive use of Web 2.0- and open source solutions ourselves. The teamwork ranges from comfy project meetings in Vienna’s coffee houses, development meetings using ‘Skype’ or collaborating with ‘Google Docs’ and ‘Gmail’, up to task management in the development timeline of the Python-Tool ‘Trac’. In this fashion work is real fun."