Management of your pictures/videos etc.   Posted on 25. Jan, 2010 by Wim Haanstra in C#, Personal stuff, WPF.

I have (just as so many people probably) been struggling to keep my digital photo’s and home-made videos manageable. I tried so many photo/media management tools that I actually lost count and they never satisfied my needs. They always kept my library as messy as it now, which is a HUGE directory, with files which have names like ‘2009_1225_183025.jpg’. Since a couple of weeks I also shoot HD movies with my camcorder and those files are already stacking up also.

I have been thinking about what could actually help me solve this problem and I think I came up with a solution to my (own) problem. I am currently making a tool with the project-name “Media-Manager”. The tool extracts all meta data from my media files and stores it nicely in a data source (e.g. SQL Server, XML files). In my tool I can specify events which happened on certain date’s (or a longer time-span) and it automatically filters the photo’s by those event.

Let me give you an example, which should clear up my story.

My oldest daughter ‘Luuke’, she has her birthday on January 7th and we always take pictures from it. In my tool I can specify an event called “Luuke’s Birthday”, which recurs yearly on the 7th of January. My tool will the propose which pictures fit with that event. You can then either confirm for each picture that it indeed is one that should be linked to that event or you confirm them in batches. The tool will then create directory structure like this:

Z:\Media\Luuke’s Birthday\2010
Z:\Media\Luuke’s Birthday\2009
Z:\Media\Luuke’s Birthday\2008
Z:\Media\Luuke’s Birthday\2007
etc.

Pictures that are uncategorized will be put in a different folder like this:

Z:\Media\Uncategorized\2010\01
Z:\Media\Uncategorized\2009\12
Z:\Media\Uncategorized\2009\11
Z:\Media\Uncategorized\2009\10
etc.

When you have categorized some pictures, for example the birthday of 2010, you can simply click that ‘Event’ and export images to a directory (maybe later to a web destination). You can specify if images should be converted to a different file-type, size or compression level.

The media manager, also reads meta-data from MTS files, these are the (Full HD video) files coming from my camcorder and it will also put those movies in the right category/event.

This is my first full-blown WPF project, where I also create my own custom controls to make sure the GUI is all nice and flashy looking. I am using Visual Studio 2010 for the development of this tool and I must say that I am hooked. Visual Studio 2010 seems so much easier to use and the WPF/XAML designer is actually pretty fast.

I hope I can actually put a release of the tool on here, once it is finished. Because I cant believe I am the only one with this nice little problem that comes with digital photography.