I could point it to a directory and it would read all the images. It wouldn’t copy them to it’s database, it wouldn’t try to change their format. It would simply read them as fast as I’ve ever seen and show me what’s in that directory. Then it would keep the directory hierarchy in place. I haven’t been able to find anything similar. I search for a similar piece of software every now and then but nothing shows up. Lightroom is close but it’s god awfully slow. I just loved how fast Picasa.
I actually did some cleaning on my computer last night and found the last Picasa dmg. Maybe I run it and see if it still works.
After the Nth photo sharing website that I'd early-adopted decided to close up shop, I determined I wanted to own the next solution I invested time into, and I founded PhotoStructure.
I've got 20-odd hard drives from laptops and servers and backups. No software that I tried, either open or closed source, would do what I wanted: organize everything into a nice, timestamped, deduped folder structure.
Many years ago, I'd shot myself in the foot by using tools to do JPEG editing and rotation, but those tools quietly deleted EXIF metadata, so PhotoStructure applies a suite of metadata inference heuristics to heal those holes, too.
The MVP is focused on high-quality metadata extraction and inference, and has a simple web-based UI. Simple editing support, along with GPS POI and face detection, is planned.
After spending more than a decade in the ads business, and (helping build) ML-powered behavior targeting based on metadata, it blows my mind that so many of us give the most rich metadata stream, our photos and videos, for free, to the FAANG. PhotoStructure isn't just an effort of love, it's also, at least in some way, penance.
I've got a limited number of beta users trying it out right now. If you're willing to share your feedback, please consider signing up. Use of PhotoStructure during the beta period is free.
Curious about privacy aspects though. When you say it's a private cloud, does it communicate back to your servers at all?
Any goals for Linux compatibility?
I'd love something that can store the photos on a NAS or network share drive, runs its processing in a Docker container on my LAN, and serves a web app locally with absolutely no external internet access. That's basically my dream photo manager. I can connect to my own LAN remotely to access it then, without any need for the privacy/security risk of hosting my (and my clients) photos on some 3rd party server.
Your images, videos, and metadata stay yours, and are not uploaded anywhere.
Currently I've got error reporting that phones home if there are critical problems detected, but the log events only include the stack trace and possibly the path to the problem file.
PhotoStructure spins up a webserver bound to localhost by default. In other words, other machines in your LAN can't open the PhotoStructure web UI (unless you set an environment variable or use ssh port forwarding).
Sign up via the website or send me an email, I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback.
Then I browse the pictures, star the ones I like and process them.
An no other software I have tried so far comes close in terms of speed and UI efficiency.
So I would also love to try PhotoStructure and have signed up via your landing page.
Also, I'd love to switch to Linux full-time but that's the main program I'm lacking. I've tried most the suggestions but none handle high numbers of photos without becoming intolerably slow.
Part of the problem is that only a small fraction of the population needs a high-performance photo manager. Most of the market has always been for "color snaps" and that has just gotten worth with the proliferation of cell phones.
If you are handling lots of RAWS and you care about speed then you have to start with hardware.
For instance, if you care about performance you just can't use a mac. Forget about it.
An application that cares about performance might tell you to ditch the hard drive on your computer for an SSD if you want to run it and that we'd rather give you your money than just give you the same bad performance you expect from Lightroom, Photos, etc.
Having your images on a RAIDed network server could be good but if you are using WiFi performance will be bad. If you feel entitled to keep using your 100 Mbps Ethernet hub on your DSL modem than performance will be bad.
Wedding photographers spend $5000 for a camera and would probably get much more than $2500 of value from a $2500 photo management suite, particularly if you factor the lower blood pressure from not staring at a spinning beach ball all day and the lower health care costs and extra years of life they could get.
Knuth's "premature optimization is the root of all evil" might have made since back in the 360 mainframe day when you couldn't get N very high so an N^2 algorithm wasn't as bad as it is today.
People today have the wishful thinking that they can find the "one" bottleneck and open it and that was sometime true in the past for prototype projects (eg. less so in the age of networking, deep cache hierarchy, ...) but in real-life systems there are usually 5-10 bottlenecks that all need to be cleared if you want to make a difference in performance that people will feel.
Most people think they can clear two or three of them and will spend a lot of effort for it and will argue until they are blue in the face and bankrupt that they don't need to fix the other ones.
Love it for quick and easy edit controls. Like the speed and looks. Wish some remaining bugs were fixed.
The only significant failing was that it couldn't handle removable media at all well.
Shotwell is the best I've found so far, but it's not quite the right feature balance for me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotwell_(software)