Flash

Demo video showing an example of how to use the program

Flash is a photo management program written in rust. It is designed to let you quickly go through new photos to pick out the best ones, and to allow you to easily find old photos that you have taken. This is done by letting you assign searchable tags to the photos you save.

The program consists of a backend server that is written in rust which serves photos to frontends. At the moment, there are two frontends for the project: Flash-frontend and Flash-cli

Flash frontend is the main interface for the program which allows you to import and view pictures as well as add tags to them. It is written in Elm and runs in the web browser.

Flash-cli, as the name implies is a commandline interface for flash. It allows you to search for pictures in the database just like you would in the web-interface but instead of just viewing them, it creates symlinks to the resulting images. This allows you to directly access the files if you want to send them to someone, or modify them using external programs.

Usage

The frontend consists of 2 pages: the album page and the viewer page. On the album page, you can search for photos by combining the following querys:

• of things, not stuff and flowers Searches for pictures containing both things and flowers, but not stuff
• this day, this month etc. Searches for images taken in the current time unit. For example: this month on august 28 will return all pictures taken in august this year.
• the past day, the past month etc. searches for images taken in the past 24 hours or 30 days.
• /path/to/folder Shows all photos in folder. The path to a folder relative to FILE_READ_PATH. This is used for adding new photos into the system

Installing

• Install the rust compiler, cargo and postgresql.
• Install diesel-cli using cargo install diesel-cli
• Create a database user and temporarily give it superuser priviliges ALTER USER <username> WITH SUPERUSER
• create a .env file containing the following:
  • DATABASE_URL=postgres://username:password@url/database_name
  • FILE_STORAGE_PATH=<path where you want the saved files to be stored>
  • FILE_READ_PATH=<A folder where you want to search for new files>
• Run diesel database setup
• Compile the frontend
  • git submodule --recursive init && git submodule --recursive update
  • cd frontend
  • make
• Run the server cargo run
• Go to localhost:3000/album.html

Future plans

The files are currently stored on a server in their original format. This works when the server and the client are on the same computer or network but might be too slow for mobile connections. A decentralised system where files are cached on each device might be a good idea.