Use Case: Perkeep as local media file indexer

[Diemo Schwarz]

Hi, excuse this terribly beginner question:

Could Perkeep be of use as a local media file indexing system (i.e. the file data itself is not copied into perkeep but stays in the files on disk)?

Use Case

• indexing of a (local) library of images, audio files, videos and their backups on several harddisks
• discovery of duplicate files
• verification that each file is present on at least 3 different backup hard disks
• harddisks can be unmounted, but their index should stay queryable
• media-specific metadata (image resolution, encoding, bit rate, etc.) should be queryable directly from the index

Extra Points

1. if a media file could be represented as a block tree which nicely separates sub-blocks containing only metadata (e.g. EXIF for images) and raw content data. (This way, duplicate images with different metadata could be detected)
2. if relationships between media files could be represented, i.e. if a photo is an edited version or a thumbnail from an original (of course, the info itself would come from the outside)
3. the immediate need is that data is (and stays securely) local, but later it could be nice to easily share some media files with specific users

If this has been asked or treated before, please excuse my ignorance and point me towards relevant sources.

Best, Diemo

[Diemo Schwarz]

To follow up and leave some pointers for people stumbling over this, I found a library that does almost all of the requirements above based on mature technologies (python and sqlite) at https://github.com/Vafilor/file-ops.

One remaining question is how best to generate a hash of a directory out of its content's hashes (that's the Merkle tree idea, right?). Is something naive like XORing the content hashes valid, or does one need a more complex combination operation? (hash the concatenated hashes?)

Best and good luck with the future of the project.

Diemo