GISterical 0.5.9

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Introduction

GISterical is a command-line tool for managing a photo library. The primary use is to sort photos in a user-defined folder structure. User defines the sorting by adding command-line flags in a specific order, for example, YmC will create and populate the folder structure where the top level is year (Y), followed by month (m) and then country (C) where the photo was taken:

2022
  |___1
  |   |__ Australia
  |   |__ Hong Kong
  |
  |___2
      |__Australia

The full list of available flags is:

• Y -- sort by year
• m -- sort by month
• d -- sort by calendar date
• C -- sort by country where the photo was taken
• c -- sort by the nearest city within a certain distance

The tool is very fast in comparison to most other photo managers I used and 3-level sorting of a 15,000 files and 40 Gb size photo collection including copying files to the target location on a different physical drive takes approximately 5 minutes.

Initial setup

The tool works by building a (local) PostGIS database containing metadata extracted from user folders and additional data for coordinates of 47,000 of major cities and country boundaries. This allows to perform merges between images with location data and spatial objects.

For this a PostgreSQL service has to be running either locally on a remote location and a blank database needs to be created with a superuser created.

Depending on the system the instructions for setting up a PostgreSQL service can be found:

• Fedora Linux
• Ubuntu-based distributions
• Windows

After the installation has been completed, a PostGIS extension needs to be additionally installed, which on common Linux distributions can be done via:

sudo dnf install postgis

or

sudo apt install postgis

On Windows systems PostGIS can be installed from a binary that can be downloaded here.

Once this has been done the final step is to create a database, user and add the extension to the database. To do it first we log into PostgreSQL management tool as a superuser

sudo -U postgres psql

Now in the console we run the following commands:

CREATE USER <new_user_name> WITH PASSWORD <password>;
CREATE DATABASE <new_db_name> OWNER <new_user_name>;
\connect <new_db_name>
CREATE EXTENSION postgis;

And finally run the following command to update the default values for database name, user name, password and hostname:

gisterical --set-connection

And now the application is fully ready to use.

Usage

Populate database

The first task is to run initial set-up of the image database and populate spatial data into the database. For this use --setup flag followed by -i or --input and the folder where photos are located:

gisterical --setup -i /home/pav/Pictures

For my 15,000-file photo collection the setup takes about 1-2 minutes. The only other option that can be used during the initial set-up is whether or not to hash the images using --hash option. Hashing will allow you to identify duplicated images even when they've been cropped or resized. If hashing is enabled then perceptual and color hashes are calculated for each image using Imagehash library.

Note: The process is approximately 100x slower with hashing enabled! So use only if you specifically need to deal with duplicates.

New folders can be added at any time to the existing database using:

gisterical --add-folder -i <path_to_folder>

Sort photos

To sort images use --sort option followed by any combination of sorting flags listed above. The order of the flags will deternime the sorting order in the resulting file structure, for example, YmC will sort with year at top level, but CYm will have country as the top-level folder.

The command also needs to be followed by the output folder name where the new file structure will be created using -o or --output options. The files are only ever copied to the new location so the original files will never be affected. The full syntax of sorting command is:

gisterical --sort <sorting_flags> -o <output_folder>

Sorting by city is the most expensive operation since a complicated merge needs to be calculated in the database. This sorting operation also finds cities within a certain radius (in kilometers) of photo location which needs to be provided using --distance option.

Note: When multiple cities fall within the search radius the one with the largest population will be selected as the location of the photo. This can also occasionally create inconsistencies between country and city of of origin in which case the best option is to reduce the search distance.

To sort with "nearest city" as one of the parameters:

gisterical --sort <sorting_flags> -o <output_folder> --distance 50

Any photos missing geolocation information will be assigned to an "Unknown" city and "Unknown" country.

Find images

The tool can additionally be used to locate images by country or nearest city. In this case the script will locate all the relevant photos and output them to an --output (-o) folder. As is for sorting, to find by city, a distance parameter is required. For example,

gisterical --find-by-city Melbourne -o /home/Pictures/Melbourne_stuff --distance 50

To search by country of origin distance is not required:

gisterical --find-by-country Malaysia -o <output_folder>