elodie

I have wondered this about an open source project I wrote about a decade ago [1] and still use. It's an order of magnitude less popular than Monica at 1.5k stars. The code base and logic is complex enough that it's hard to fix bugs and add features nowadays since they're few and far between. The test coverage is the only thing that makes it remotely possible. I've considered doing the same, rewriting it so that AI can reason about it better. I think it would be a net positive compared to where it is today. But it's also stable, as I mentioned, so I don't have enough motivation to do it. Just saying, I can see myself doing what this person is doing. [1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie

I have used this approach with exiftool to add custom tags for “album”. https://stackoverflow.com/a/68284922 Here is my source file for it. It was so long ago I don’t recall all the details but you can retrieve this information using exif commands. https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/configs/ExifTo...

My 10+ year old photo management system [1] relies on the file system and EXIF as the source of truth for my entire photo library. It’s proven several times over that it’s the correct approach. Abstractions (formerly Google photos, currently Immich) should just be built on top - but these proprietary databases are only for convenience. For work, I’m having the same experience as the author and everything is just markdown and csv files for Claude Code (for research and document writing). [1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie

I did say it was robust… I include video [1] and audio (.m4a) [2] files via EXIF. For text files [3], I add a JSON block at the top to mimic EXIF. I don’t want to deal with an additional sidecar file per asset. The risk of losing one during a transfer between systems is too high. It’s a conscious decision and not an oversight. [1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/2645bf25b81c63f65d6f1... [2] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/elodie/media/a... [3] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/elodie/media/t...