Media Library: Application Premise

As I understand it, much of the open source movement is driven not by ideals, but by an itch. A developer has a need to create something, usually a tool or an app or a library or the like, to address a need the developer has.

I have a mighty itch: organizing my media.

Specifically, I have downloaded a moderately large number of files for use as a publisher and a game developer. Not too many, only on the order of hundreds of thousands.

• My graphics library contains 229,244 titles.
  • This does not include CGAxis collections I have not yet uploaded.
  • Many of the graphics library files are themselves ZIP files containing many images.
• My sounds library is a little smaller, only 98,709 files loaded… but I have several sounds packages I have not loaded yet.
• My ‘RPG library’ (DriveThruRPG, Paizo, d20pfsrd, Humble Bundle, etc.) is quite small in comparison, 39,033 files.
  • Again, many files are actually ZIP files containing multiple files… sometimes two or three, sometimes over a hundred).
• My ‘Technical books’ library (Humble Bundle, Fanatical, etc.) is only about 3,500 files (but I have a couple hundred files to upload).
  • Actual ‘books’ are pretty accurate, but some of these are ZIP files containing a very large number of source files.
  • For that matter, there are also videos (tutorials) and ZIP files containing many videos.

I need a better way to manage this. I’ve been (ab)using calibre, which does much of what I need, but doesn’t quite match what I want.

So, me being me, I’ve decided to explore a little bit about what I want out of this tool. If it happens I find one that does what I want and need, great! But having spent a bit of time searching, I’m not entirely certain I will… so laying out my thoughts will help me decide if I really want to scratch my itch the hard way and build my own tool.