What are everyone's tips for importing photos to make best use of metadata and views?
Let's assume there's no need to be compatible with a photo manager app, but we may be importing lots of duplicates, and while content deduplication is great, I'd like to avoid naming problems too.
Do you bother to rename your photos?
Do you use EXIF metadata as git-annex metadata? Selectively or wholesale, with all the redundant tags in EXIF?
If you do use a photo manager app, do you need to do anything special to make that work?
Thanks for your responses everyone!
-mike
git-annex's metadata and views made me stop hopping between programs (digikam, tagsistant etc.) to organise my photos (I had even just started working on my own FUSE tagging filesystem which was effectively going to be tagsistant, but with a git-annex'y backend).
As usual, my method is probably a little odd
Photos are 'git import'ed into a $(uuidgen) directory (so no worries about filename collisions) and tagged with media=Photograph and tag=untagged. Then I go through them and add relevant tags (one of which is "xbmc", no prizes for guessing how that works with the views :]) and move them into a more appropriate directory structure, using gqview and its "sort manager". This is really nice and fast, due to it only copying/moving symlinks!
One thing I'm considering doing it putting a shim between git-annex and gqview, so that it generates entries in the sort manager which are appropriate for the current view. So, for example, if the view is location=*, the sort manager would have:
While it wouldn't get updated if I create new tags (by creating directories in the view), it would save a lot of time creating them every time the view changes.
It seems to me that there is a lot of cruft in EXIF that I would not want to bloat my git-annex branch with storing. That's why automatically adding metadata imports only the listed fields. It's easy to add fields later and re-run the metadata importer on your existing files.
I have not gotten as far as having any best practices to share.