I have a very valuable folder on my computer called “Inspiration.” It contains years worth of images that I’ve collected from the web. It’s a digital scrapbook – a bin full of neat things and ideas for when I’m feeling stuck or need a reference for something like a water bug. Most of us have something like this, right?
There are two problems with this folder.
1) It’s an unorganized mess of thousands of pictures.
2) My Dell Vostro Laptop has died TWICE in the past year. While I’m compulsive about backing up my data, sometimes I go a couple of weeks between making a DVD. I may collect quite a few images in two weeks.
So, this weekend I took a few hours and I created an application called Perspiration™. [And, yes, I’m super busy with teaching, taking classes and all the other projects on my desk. I just needed to do something else for a bit. Savvy?]
Perspiration™ lets me upload an image to a password protected website and apply tags to the image. I can then search on tags, image names or have it show me random images. I wrote it in PHP, and the cool thing is, there’s no database. It uses text files, so the whole thing is highly portable (or as highly portable as thousands of images can be). I’m using jQuery to handle thumbnail and image previews.
I’m *almost* finished with it – I’ll post the source code when I’m done for any peeps who want something like this.
This guy has a folder, too. Enjoy: