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 ImageMagick package. Currently, `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-get-exif-data' and `image-dired-set-exif-data' to work, the command line tool `exiftool' is needed. It can be found here: https://exiftool.org/. These two functions are, among other things, used for writing comments to image files using `image-dired-thumbnail-set-image-description' and to create "unique" file names using `image-dired-get-exif-file-name' (used by `image-dired-copy-with-exif-file-name'). 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 format. * WARNING: The "database" format used might be changed so keep a backup of `image-dired-db-file' when testing new versions. * `image-dired-display-image-mode' does not support animation TODO ==== * Support gallery creation when using per-directory thumbnail storage. * Some sort of auto-rotate function based on rotate info in the EXIF data. * 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. * From thumbs.el: Add setroot function. * From thumbs.el: Add image resizing, if useful (image-dired's automatic "image fit" might be enough) * From thumbs.el: Add the "modify" commands (emboss, negate, monochrome etc). * 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 orinstead 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. * Enhanced gallery creation with basic CSS-support and pagination of tag pages with many pictures. * Rewrite `image-dired-modify-mark-on-thumb-original-file' to be less ugly. * In some way keep track of buffers and windows and stuff so that it works as the user expects. * More/better documentation