MeDaMa

The development of MeDaMa has been abandoned. It might not even compile any longer on a modern Lisp implementation. The are several reasons behind this decision:

CLG, sadly, doesn't have a maintainer already for quite some years and requires more and more tweaks the older it gets
The target Lisp systems (CMUCL and SBCL) are still based on a memory allocation method that is not foreign library friendly; GTK would run out of memory very quickly just performing the most basic operations
Lack of time on my side
Out there are better programs that do almost the same thing (although based on a RDBMS, which I meant to avoid like the plague)

If you are still interested in having a peek in its code, what follows is the original page.

MeDaMa (medama-20150207T213705.tbz) is a meta-data manager in general, and a picture manager in particular, written to archive, sort and ultimately make sense of my increasingly messy collection of photographs. Although still under development it can already do several things:

Associate arbitrary meta-data (in form of tag and string pairs) to any file no matter its type. Support for simultaneous tagging of sets of files.

Search files by filename, meta-data (also using regular expressions) and date. Automatic generation of search queries of similar files.

Move, copy, rename, delete files.

Create file lists as if they were collections.

Preview images internally, or show them with your favourite viewer.

Create web galleries in the style you want. Styles can be saved and used again.

Create CD/DVD images (optionally burn them right away) of collection of files.

Support for drag-and-drop.

Tag-sensitive content completion history.

Some highlights:

Files don't need to support any type of tagging as the metadata is kept separate from the file it belongs to.

No centrilised database. MeDaMa doesn't even require a particular directory structure (besides its own hidden directories) and meta-data can be added to any file wherever it happens to be.
No need for awkward backup/restores when moving files around either. Meta-data is kept right next to the file. You can move or copy your directories with normal shell commands or create CD-ROM images of any portion of your directory tree and your metadata will follow.

MeDaMa doesn't impose on you any semantic restriction on the metadata you associate to your files. Although some tags are suggested as standard, others can be freely added on the spur of the moment.
MeDaMa doesn't even enforce an arbitrary meaning to things like categories, collections, keywords, albums, etc. Users are free to do anything they like with meta-data tags.

MeDaMa doesn't impose any special organisational behaviour or work flow.

Although some of the most common commands have been already implemented, MeDaMa is extensible and new operations can be added with few mouse clicks.

On CMUCL it's quite responsive. On SBCL it's even faster but rather fragile, due to some issues still pending in the use of kernel threads.

Not using a traditional database, it may be a little slow on search over large directory trees, but for many practical applications (like collection of photographs), the speed penalty is acceptable as the metadata is a tiny fraction of the data.

No loss of data has ever been reported this far.

To compile, a Makefile is provided; just type make and after a while you should be able to run mdm from your command line.

Some screen shots:

	The directory browser mode.
	The search mode.
	The preview mode.
	The gallery creation dialog.
	The CD/DVD image creation dialog: selection of the output file.
	The CD/DVD image creation dialog: filesystem parameters.
	The CD/DVD image creation dialog: filesystem parameters with automatic splitting.
	The CD/DVD image creation dialog: burn parameteres.
	The CD/DVD image creation dialog: process output.
	A gallery. In the real galleries produced by MeDaMa the thumbnail links to an HTML page that shows the picture's metadata as well.
	Another gallery.

All the photographs on these pages are copyright Walter C. Pelissero. All rights are reserved. No copy, manipulation or transfer, beside for the sake of personal view of the page where they appear on, is allowed. Also the direct linking of web pages to the single photograph image is forbidden.