RE: keeping a photo library in a svn repository

(Apologies for the formatting; Outlook doesn't handle HTML to plain text very well... Response inline)

        From: sebastien.barthelemy_at_gmail.com [mailto:sebastien.barthelemy_at_gmail.com] On Behalf Of Sébastien Barthélemy
        Sent: Tuesday, 5 August 2008 09:40
        To: users_at_subversion.tigris.org
        Subject: keeping a photo library in a svn repository
        
        
        Hello everybody,
        
        I'm in the process of writing a bunch of python scripts to manage my
        photo library.
        
        I would like it to be versioned, and thus I'm wondering if svn would
        be suited for that. To give you an idea, I currently have 6100 pictures, "weighting" 7,2 Go. Most pictures won't be modified except for the exim metadata (fix date and orientation), and later icmp and xmp metadata.
        
        So what do you think about it ? Could svn handle that much data on a
        regular computer ? Let's say regular=mine ;) : 1Go RAM and a core duo
        processor.

I ran SVN on a laptop with 512MB, and it ran just fine. I used Apache as well, and often had various Java applications running too. On occasion I'd fire up GIMP, though the images I were working on were typically small (compared to photographs). I'd say you should be fine. SVN's good with low-specced machines.
        
        One problem is that a checkout takes twice the necessary space because of the "original version" of every file that is kept.
        As I plan to keep the repository on the same computer than the checkout, I will need 3x7,2Go, that is a lot of wasted space. Moreover, in such a case, there is no point in keeping the "original version" in the checkout. Is there any solution to this ?

You don't need to checkout the entire repository, so you could have small, temporary working copies, containing just what you're currently working on. I don't know how you organise your photos, but for argument's sake let's say you organise them by month and year. Simply checkout "2008/July", work on the images, commit, and delete the working copy.
        
        That's it, feel free to criticize if the idea sounds bad to you.

Sounds fine to me. One thing that's worth mentioning is that SVN handles binaries fine (in terms of storage efficiency); what you will lose (though I suspect it won't affect you) is the ability to merge changes if two or more people work on the photo at the same time. If this is the case you'll need to look at SVN's locking mechanism to prevent multiple users from modifying the file simultaneously.

Cheers
John
        
        Cheers
        
        
        --
        Sébastien Barthélemy
        

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Received on 2008-08-05 00:13:08 CEST