An app for tagging and organizing large numbers of photos efficiently.

This arose out of my Pho image viewer (Pho on GitHub), which was starting to get unwieldy as I added ever more tagging features to what was intended as just a fast, light image viewer. (Ironically, metapho will eventually replace pho: the new Tk version of metapho includes a tkpho image viewer script that's intended to be feature-compatible with pho, while the original pho will die once GTK2 ceases to be easily available.)

Metapho is intended as a lightweight, flexible way of organizing large numbers of photos. It uses text files, not a proprietary database, so you're not locked down to one app or a proprietary database, and you can view your tags databases at any time, or edit them in a text editor. Basically, you run it on a directory of images you've just uploaded:

metapho *.jpg

and once you've tagged them all, it creates a file named Tags.

Metapho can be driven entirely from the keyboard: you should be able to do everything you need without moving your hands to the mouse, though you can use the mouse if you find that easier.

Historically, metapho has been built on GTK (currently GTK3), though it never needed gnome or any other desktop services. But after trying to port it to GTK4, I decided it would be easier to rewrite it in Tk, plus it would be easier for people on non-Linux OSes. So metapho 2.0 will be Tk based, without a GTK dependency.

Currently (January 2025) the default metapho is still GTK3-based, but it also installs a new Tk-based version. So you'll get:

• metapho: GTK3-based metapho tagging app
• gmetapho: GTK3-based metapho tagging app
• tkmetapho: TkInter-based metapho tagging app
• tkpho: TkInter-based pho image viewer

When 2.0 is released, metapho and pho will become the TkInter versions, though gmetapho will still work if you have GTK3 libraries installed.

The GTK version of metapho includes ways of defining tag categories: for example, you could have a category called People with tags like Jane, Sally and Nancy, and you could view only the People tags in the metapho window. The Tk version doesn't have this (I found I never used categories) but it could. If you're a user of metapho and you use categories, please let me know or file a GitHub issue! Otherwise it will be a low priority and I won't hold up the 2.0 release for it.

Installing also gets you three command-line scripts:

notags:
Examine the current directory recursively and tell you about files and directories that still need to be tagged. Run it at the root of an image directory that might have untagged subdirectories.

fotogr:
Search for files with particular tags. For instance, fotogr cat will print the names of all files you've tagged with "cat".

photoshare:
Manage files tagged with "share" or "wallpaper". See photoshare -h for more info.

Metapho is available on PyPi, so you can install it as pip install metapho (though of course the PyPI version won't always have the very latest features and bug fixes).

To install from the source directory, use pip install .

The Metapho Documentation had more information on both the app and the API of the classes inside it. Sadly, this is now out of date because the tools I used to generate the documentation no longer work, and I haven't had time or energy to port the documentation to a different system.