Image Desk
The idea of this project was to explore how to organize images in a different way.
Most images organizers we saw, focus on how to classify the images, including fancy features like AI classification of objects and similar features, but they don't have a good way so view many images at the same time.
The idea was not only in how to classify images, but experiment in how to layout the images in a more organized way. To try and to put the images in a way to facilitate the view of many files.
And to experiment on that, here is how Image Desk works.
Main View
On the main view the images are organized by columns.
The first column show a filtered view as configured on the filter panel. If there is no filters nor tags selected, the column show all images with 0 tags.
The rest of the columns shows the images that have the corresponding tag, or the set of images of a corresponding filter.
Filter Panel
To understand the filter panel first I need to explain the concept of filters and tags in this software.
Tags are very straightforward, you create an tag, give it a name and color, and you can assign up to 8 tags to each image, and the image will appear the the columns of it's tags
Filters are a set of tags and also other filters, a image cannot be assigned a filter.
On the filter panel you can select the set of tags of each filter with some options, on the top left you have two circles representing if the filter is an Union of tags or an Intersection of tags. Also on each tag you can include or exclude from the set.
When clicked, the button "Save as filter" will save your current selections as an filter that will receive its own column.
Image Panel
When hovering an image or selecting it, a panel will appear showing some basic information about the image and also allowing to add tags to the image.
Map View
On the map view the images with location data will be organized by the latitude and longitude on a map.
Future thoughts
This was a really fun project to work on, but we feel like there is a loot more to explore for this project. So in the future we plan to continue the development, trying to improve on the layout of the images, and do more ways to organize, like the map view.
Add features like finding duplicate images, sorting by date and other parameters, and also add basic image editing tools.
Video demos
Download
Download the file and extract, you will see a windows and linux folder, inside there is the executable.
This project uses SDL2, if you are using linux you need to have sdl2 and sdl2_ttf installed on your system, the binary was compiled under arch linux, it may or may not work on other distributions. The windows version comes with the SDL2.dll and SDL_ttf.dll
To test copy some images to the images folder, on the first time it will create an index.imdi file on the same folder as the executable, this is used to store some metadata of each image and also the list of tags and filters. If you add or delete any images from the image folder you need to delete the index file otherwise the program may crash, this is not the intended behaviour, but we didn't have time to fix it.
