Homepage: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs
Author: Mathias Dahl
Use dired to browse and manipulate your images
BACKGROUND
==========
I needed a program to browse, organize and tag my pictures. I got
tired of the old gallery program I used as it did not allow
multi-file operations easily. Also, it put things out of my
control. Image viewing programs I tested did not allow multi-file
operations or did not do what I wanted it to.
So, I got the idea to use the wonderful functionality of Emacs and
`dired' to do it. It would allow me to do almost anything I wanted,
which is basically just to browse all my pictures in an easy way,
letting me manipulate and tag them in various ways. `dired' already
provide all the file handling and navigation facilities; I only
needed to add some functions to display the images.
I briefly tried out thumbs.el, and although it seemed more
powerful than this package, it did not work the way I wanted to. It
was too slow to create thumbnails of all files in a directory (I
currently keep all my 2000+ images in the same directory) and
browsing the thumbnail buffer was slow too. image-dired.el will not
create thumbnails until they are needed and the browsing is done
quickly and easily in Dired. I copied a great deal of ideas and
code from there though... :)
`image-dired' stores the thumbnail files in `image-dired-dir'
using the file name format ORIGNAME.thumb.ORIGEXT. For example
~/.emacs.d/image-dired/myimage01.thumb.jpg. The "database" is for
now just a plain text file with the following format:
file-name-non-directory;comment:comment-text;tag1;tag2;tag3;...;tagN
PREREQUISITES
=============
* The GraphicsMagick or ImageMagick package; Image-Dired uses
whichever is available.
A) For GraphicsMagick, `gm' is used.
Find it here: http://www.graphicsmagick.org/
B) For ImageMagick, `convert' and `mogrify' are used.
Find it here: https://www.imagemagick.org.
* For non-lossy rotation of JPEG images, the JpegTRAN program is
needed.
* For `image-dired-set-exif-data' to work, the command line tool `exiftool' is
needed. It can be found here: https://exiftool.org/. This
function is, among other things, used for writing comments to
image files using `image-dired-thumbnail-set-image-description'.
USAGE
=====
This information has been moved to the manual. Type `C-h r' to open
the Emacs manual and go to the node Thumbnails by typing `g
Image-Dired RET'.
Quickstart: M-x image-dired RET DIRNAME RET
where DIRNAME is a directory containing image files.
LIMITATIONS
===========
* Supports all image formats that Emacs and convert supports, but
the thumbnails are hard-coded to JPEG or PNG format. It uses
JPEG by default, but can optionally follow the Thumbnail Managing
Standard (v0.9.0, Dec 2020), which mandates PNG. See the user
option `image-dired-thumbnail-storage'.
* WARNING: The "database" format used might be changed so keep a
backup of `image-dired-tags-db-file' when testing new versions.
TODO
====
* Investigate if it is possible to also write the tags to the image
files.
* From thumbs.el: Add an option for clean-up/max-size functionality
for thumbnail directory.
* Add `image-dired-display-thumbs-ring' and functions to cycle that. Find out
which is best, saving old batch just before inserting new, or
saving the current batch in the ring when inserting it. Adding
it probably needs rewriting `image-dired-display-thumbs' to be more general.
* Find some way of toggling on and off really nice keybindings in
Dired (for example, using C-n or instead of C-S-n).
Richard suggested that we could keep C-t as prefix for
image-dired commands as it is currently not used in Dired. He
also suggested that `dired-next-line' and `dired-previous-line'
figure out if image-dired is enabled in the current buffer and,
if it is, call `image-dired-dired-next-line' and `image-dired-dired-previous-line',
respectively. Update: This is partly done; some bindings have
now been added to Dired.
* In some way keep track of buffers and windows and stuff so that
it works as the user expects.
* More/better documentation.