It was way ahead of it's time, and actually worked!
Best of all, it did everything locally... not cloud based and thus retained privacy of your personal photo collection.
It took multiple disparate photo directories and presented everything in a timeline of folders. And because everything was local, that happened quickly, rather than waiting for your browser to get the next 100 photo results from a javascript call or whatever.
Are there any photo clients for windows that present multiple folders as a single coherent timeline? And can manage tens of thousands of pictures? I've got stuff going back to the late 1990s and would love to be able to find all those old cat pictures or whatever.
PhotoStructure does this (and I believe is the only software that does robust time zone inference, as well). (I've posted elsewhere here with more details).
Doesn't help much for privacy, however.
I'd love to have you try out the beta and have you share feedback!
One question though - if you end up feeling it's unsustainable to continue developing PhotoStructure down the line do you have a plan? Obviously we would rather not be burned by it either, you you consider at that point making it open source so existing users can continue and make improvements?
Certainly I hope it never comes to it but it's nice to have a little reassurance.
1) There's a corporate mandate to open-source PhotoStructure for Desktop in the event of business closure.
2) Your library consists of industry-standard files. If you choose to do so, your originals are copied into a standard YYYY/YYYY-mm-dd/ folder hierarchy. XMP sidecars are added to hold inferred or novel metadata and store nondestructive edits, like rotation. A SQLite db (with commented schema! it's pretty, honest!) holds asset-file-tag relationships, albums, and other non-file metadata.
3) It's just me, and I love open source, so if I can get to the point where my licensing stream pays for food and shelter, I can open source then.
It's really the killer-feature that made Picassa so great - find all the photos over several years of a family member or friend.
Sadly, I've needed this feature for funeral photo albums lately and could really use the old Picassa!
Sorry if I missed it, but is it possible (API or directly) to control Photostructure via python?
That way we could extend the features in many interesting ways - including our own face/object detection.