ShutterStem

ShutterStem enables apps that are optimized for organizing—and enjoying—a lifetime of photos.

It grew out of dissatifcation with existing tools for shutterbugs: chosing between either inflexible libraries stuck on the big computer at home, or having to somehow upload terabytes of life history to a hopefully-trustworthy cloud provider. I wanted better, and I suspect there are others (e.g. photojournalists or citizens in sensitive situations) that need better.

ShutterStem is ultimately envisioned as a scalable, syncable local network appliance. It will provide some polished core features like backup/sync, import/export/upload, basic organization/editing, etc. as well as an open API (with flexible schema) to enable custom integrations and extensions.

Rough demos:

• Seasons

  Traditional grid view reenvisioned to give users a feel for the overall "landscape" while navigating a lifetime of photos. Features a horizontally-scrolling daily histogram with seasons reminiscent of icicles and stalactites.

  As with all the apps, its interface is designed to support both desktop and tablet browsers.

• Old Organizer

  First proof-of-concept, a basic clone of typical grid+albums consumer photo organizer apps. (The pagination sucked, hence Seasons above.)

  Notice this app shares the same underlying data as e.g. Baskets below. A core ShutterStem concept is a single library supporting diverse interfaces: apps optimized for particular workflows and user contexts.

• Baskets

  Experimenting with organization on very limited devices (e.g eReaders, etc.) and with concepts of how apps could extend each other.

  The experience isn't great, but you can actually pull up this in a separate window (or iframe) and use it in conjunction with photo selections in the Seasons app above.

• Photo map

  Shows a map of geotagged photos, with concern given to scaling even when thousands of photos are in one location.

  TODO: this doesn't show the photos/thumbnails themselves yet!

• Journeys

  (This is actually part of a separate set of location logging utilities but shows an overview of data used by the geotagger below.)

  NOTE: this requires sample data that I haven't added to this library yet…sorry!

• Geotagalog

  A port of what I wanted for Geotagalog 3.0, much easier using HTML5 and building atop CouchDB than it ever was versus Cocoa/iPhoto!

  NOTE: this requires sample data that I haven't added to this library yet…sorry!

• Quick Captioning

  Quick-and-dirty start porting my ancient flCaptionater app to ShutterStem. The idea is that you can get into a nice rhythm (describe, hit enter, describe hit enter…) and add text descriptions to hundreds/thousands of photos per session.

  TODO: needs a way to navigate to a particular starting photo amongst hundreds of thousands (original app's UI didn't scale)

• Caption Search

  Super simple proof-of-concept instant search of captioned photos.

  TODO: better stemming/indexing, nicer interface, etc. etc.

• Tepui

  Basically unstarted, but the idea is to make a multitouch (and self-hosted ;-) version of the now-gone Tabblo — a site that let you layout photos and text in kind of a lightbox/scrapbook/webpage style, to share whole stories!

  TODO: implement

Questions/comments/ideas? Wanna try it yourself? Check out the source repository, or get in touch with me directly.