a glob of nerdishness

It wasn’t long after my parents bought me my first digital camera that I started thinking about the problem of photo organization. (And before that, I’d been pondering file organization in general.)

Call it digital asset management, content curation, or just getting better at sharing photos with my family and friends; it’s a problem for me. I’ve gone from using Windows Explorer to Picasa to iPhoto and now back to Finder, leaving behind half-hearted attempts at organization in text files, SQLite databases and AlbumData.xml backups, strewn across who knows how many “primary” computers. In seven years I have taken nearly a hundred thousand photos but shared less than twenty-five hundred online — with a huge gap between my early attempts and my current sharing.

I’m sick of legacy photo apps, no matter how “professional” they cost. To ever get my pictures successfully organized, I need a photo library that is:

• open (extendable)
• decentralized (syncable)
• scalable

So I’m writing one, with a lot of help from CouchDB. It’s called ShutterStem and it’s not ready for human consumption. But if you’re a developer you can check out version 0.1 via its github project page.