I hate to admit it, but Microsoft got a lot of things right with Microsoft Live Photo Gallery. Easy tagging, hierarchical tags, easy navigation by date, multiple tags etc. However they missed one important point, if i want to get to a picture from any other windows app, i can't use my tags at all, and I have no idea what folder it is in! So I've got an idea, i want to make a program that will watch the same folders that Photo Gallery watches, and when there are changes update a set of virtual directorys with symlinks to the pictures. So if a picture is tagged with "Events/Christmas People/Family" and the picture was taken on "December 4th, 2007" it would create virtual directories "By Tag\Events\Christmas", "By Tag\People\Family", "By Date\2007\12\4" and put symlinks to the picture in each of those directories (and parent directories). Then if I want to upload that picture online it is easy to find by going through my directory structure which will exactly mirror the tags I've put in Photo Gallery.

So I'm asking for some feedback, some suggestions, some help?, anything realy.

Features I want to have:

• Automatically watch my picture folders and update Virtual folders (Win32::ChangeNotify)
• Create Symlinks to the actual pictures (Win32::Symlink or Win32::Hardlink)
• Systray Icon (to allow changing settings) (Win32::SysTray)
• Read existing tags from image files (Image::ExifTool)
• Monitor virtual folders for added files and move those files to the correct photo directory, tag them, and then create appropriate symlinks (Image::ExifTool,Win32::ChangeNotify,Win32::Symlink)

I believe I'm also going to need threading of some sort to run multiple ChangeNotify's and the GUI. If anyone has suggestions, warnings, ideas, anything at all I would appreciate it. I'm just starting this project and don't know anything about most of these modules so I figured i'd meditate on it and see if I had an epiphany! ;) Also, if anyone is interested on working on this with me i'd love the help (even if you just want to help test it!)

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.