Today was definitely and undoubtedly an Aaargh! day.
If you've been following this blog for a bit, you will be familiar with my search of a new image database to use instead of my old one, which is not supported anymore. Well. I had a go again yesterday at the migration process, looking at some possible pitfalls... and there was not just one, but two rather large ones.
The first is the lack of support for videos. I asked in the support forum, and they'd like to add it, but that has not made it to the development timeline/plan yet... so whether it will come at all, or if so when, is unclear. That would have meant organising all the video files in a separate programme, or in a somehow separate way, which would have sucked.
The second one, though, was the absolute bummer. My current system relies on there being a watch folder; the programme, as the word implies, watches that folder and imports everything new into the database. No caption, no tags, obviously, only the exif data contents - but then I can go through the new files and finish giving them metadata. Tropy, the thing I thought would save all my problems, also allows you to set a watch folder. Unfortunately, though, it allows you the setting, but at least in my case it does not do the watching. None of the files in the watch folder appeared in the database.
And that makes it a hard no, and a back to square one for me.
So. Any of you has a hint on what programme runs locally, refers to an existing file structure without re-naming or shifting or copying files, supports video formats (at least to include them, internal viewer entirely optional), supports fuzzy dates (as in a date range, or only the year), has keywords/tags, and bonus points for it being free/open source or at least a single-pay license, and the possibility to sort into albums/boxes/lists or whatever virtual subgroups independent of the folder structure. Oh yes, and it should be possible to install, set up and run it without learning how to program first.
Sometimes it's really frustrating.