It’s amazing what you find when you look closely at how you use a computer nowadays — I only just realised that ages ago I have put together this little Java application to help me sort out my mobile phone image collection every time I download them onto my computer…yet even though I’ve been using it for a while after writing it, it never crossed my mind to “publish” it here. It’s not the greatest app, I’ll give you that, however, if you’re just as disorganised as I am with the pictures on your phone, then you’ll probably find it handy. I normally got on for a few weeks taking pictures and then all of a sudden I seem to realise I got tons of them on my phone and download them on the computer; at this point I go through them and try to remember what the occasion of each picture was and typically end up creating folders to remind me of those and moving groups of photos in the created folders. So I’ll end up with folders like Christmas Party 2009, Sister Visiting Dec 2010 and so on, then start moving photos in each folder. This can be a tedious job as I need to open each file in a picture viewer, see what it’s all about then close the viewer and go and move the file to the folder. I know this can be done by viewing the thumbnails of the photos and moving them but I struggle sometimes with the small thumbnails (old age, see 😉 ) and in most cases I need to see the photo in full to remind myself what it was all about (and as such where it should be going). Hence this app.
Even though I wrote it more than a couple of years ago, I still have plans to extend it in the future (rotate photos, make folders on the fly etc) — but for now here’s the first version of this for those who might find it useful.
It’s a simple Java Swing application which allows you to browse to a directory of your choice then traverses through all the images in that folder (jpg, png, gif etc) and shows on the right-hand side a list of sub-directories — simply click on one of the folders and the current image file will be moved to that folder and the program will advance to showing the next image.
The attached bzip2/tar archive contains the sources, the ant build file as well as the final catalog.jar file. This is a self-executable jar file — in most cases double-click on it and it will start the main application class. Alternatively in the command line type:
java -jar catalog.jar |
to start the application.
The program will create a simple .properties file where it saves the last directory you have browsed to — so next time it starts it will use the same directory, without you having to browse to it. (Point of that is that I always download the pictures from my phone in My Pictures folder 🙂 ) Currently the list of image files supported is hard-coded in the source code, however, as and when I’ll get the time to spend on this, it’s very likely these will move in the .properties file as well; either way, deleting the .properties file doesn’t prevent the app from running next time around, as another one will be created if not found.
If you want to change the sources (please do share any updates/patches with me!), simply run the ant build.xml file to re-package the jar file (might want to change the version though in the MANIFEST.MF manifest file though 😉 ).
Other than that, as I said, hopefully soon I’ll have an update for this and make it more user-friendly … assuming the feedback is positive on this (or at least not a negative one!).
Download the full bzip2/tar archive with sources and compiled code here.
