Been working on organizing the thousands and thousands of images I've saved over the years. It's been going really well for the most part! I sorted them somewhat ages ago, and the sad fact of how often seeing something cool on Twitter for a decade meant clicking the like button rather than saving things locally to actually have them within reach years later.

But where I've hit a real snag has been the gigantic folder of pokemon fan art, which clocks in at like 5,000 pictures with like 2,000 just sitting in the root of it and not categorized at all. It's where the intersection of all cataloging issues show up at once.

The last time I went through it I tried to break things up by species for pokemon you'd expect to see a lot of art of, and anything in their evolutionary lines/forms. Even this ran into a problem of what to name the directory, where I just went with vibes of what I felt was the most "iconic" of that line. So the folder is "Pikachu" and "Lucario" and not "Pichu" and "Riolu". (Though riolu stocks have shot way up in the past few years).

Then there are folders like "Legendaries" or "Starters" that cast a wider net and rely on visual distinctness and the fact that I haven't exactly saved a lot of cool Zapdos pics.

Really the goal of all this, then and now, pokemon or otherwise, is to have a chance of finding an image. If a friend was asking if I had that picture of a Zangoose holding Seviper's face in his hands and yelling KISS ME YOU BASTARD, just having a folder for zangeese (zangooses) narrows the search tree to a dig I'm willing to undertake. Especially as it's all images that I saved because I liked. I'm gonna get to look at a lot of good zangoose pictures in the process.

The nets get wider, relying on a lack of overall popularity and likelyhood that I'll see cool art of em. There are folders for both bug types and ghost types. For an idea of the last time I tried putting work into sorting things, I was surprised to find a folder named "doggo" for like Growlithe and Lycanroc.

This system is fine for my brain because it's only for me anyway. There's a big problem though. Lots of these images have more than one subject! The last time I sorted things, I took the brute force approach and just duplicated images into multiple folders so that a hunt in any spot would work, but that system sucks and I wish I hadn't done that now.

And this is where my sorting hits its snag. Sure it works out sometimes, see every picture of Eevee with Eeveelutions that all get lumped in the same folder anyway. But it falls apart more often than not.

Mastodon folks had elaborate ideas about renaming files to a standardized format to help identify subjects, and some well-meaning rando (who I think is like friend of friend and not 10 steps removed from me) was saying it sounded like something AI would be good with.

Lol. Lmao. No.

Of course all this stems from the fact that I don't want this to be a miserable slog. Putting "meowth" in the filename of anything would certainly work, but that's effort. It's effort if I do it by hand. It's effort if I attempt to write a program to let me just say "Yes. Meowth is there".

Anyway, all that to talk about the kind of work I've done for sorting images over the years.

I couldn't say when I first cared enough to bother sorting things, but it was already enough of a hassle that first time. I found some program that was called like SortPic or something straightforward like that which would just iterate through your images and you could bind shortcuts to move things to subdirectories. It was really useful, but pretty limited. It only supported jpegs as it was aimed for digital photography.

At some point I opted to take matters into my own hands and I'm sure buried on an old hard drive somewhere I've got a copy of "Key Curator", which used Python and the PyGame library to load a wider variety of image types as a sprite that would be displayed and use keyboard handling to let me press keys to move them where I wanted.

This was definitely how I did most of the work. Animated GIFs obviously didn't play loaded this way, but for everything else it was pretty solid. Enough so that I can still tell you "A" for "Ads" (because i enjoyed weird vintage ads), "R" for "aRt", "E" for "scrEenshot", "G" for "Gif", "V" for "aVatars", "C" for "Comics", and so on.

It was a mess of early programming from yours truly. I think it had an ini file with lines that were just "E=C:\Users\Dos\My Pictures\Screenshots"

At some point, I iterated on it even further, allowing keys to pick subdirectories and change the shortcuts, so "C" to pick the comics folder, and then "A" to pick the Achewood folder there.

Since then I've messed around with browser versions, usually just running a webserver, but I think at one point I had something that didn't actually do the sorting, but append command prompt lines to move individual files and then I'd just chuck it into a batch file and it would do the work. (Failing miserably on art by japanese artists with non-ASCII characters, but who's counting)

Without getting too lewd, all these systems also were useful for the other folder on my computer that contains a lot of images. At times I've done work to specifically focus on those, and even now have a mostly-but-not-quite complete setup. The uh criteria for what I'm looking for and how easy I'd like it to be to find it is a bit different there though. For a more modern solution I've tried going for a system where the images themselves are just dropped into folders by year so I can browse fairly randomly, while actually using a database to tag things. Not in like the absurd e621 sense, but a few major tags with hopes to add more fine grained tags later. But oops it's still a pain to do all this and so now these images are also trapped in their own kind of hell that has only made it harder to find things.

Because surprise, previously I was using the older methods to sort by the er, primary "appeal".

Part of me still wonders if it would be worth just biting the bullet and doing this for the main picture gallery, but being unable to actually do all the work with the smaller image set (actually IDK if that's even the case...) makes me reluctant.

But all this to reveal the one thing I did find that can be helpful for zipping through images, is a faux captcha system. Setting a tag to apply, and then it showing a grid of 9 images and using keyboard shortcuts to mark images where said tag applies. This makes it possible to focus on one tag at a time, which does mean making multiple passes through the data set, but it doesn't feel as tedious as the focus on a single thing makes it easier to just tag and move on to the next set rapidly.

Anyway that's my really weird post. I don't know what my point is.