bigpicture Cataloguer
This program downloads the entire Boston Globe Big Picture photo series and tags each photo with their relevant caption.
Upon execution, you will be asked for a path to a directory to store the photos. If you provide “C:\My Photos\”, for example, the photos will be organised as such:
c:\My Photos\2008\05\Cassini Nears Four-year Mark\02 – cassini2.jpg
From version 0.3 onwards, it is possible to provide the target directory as a command line argument, optionally with the “-q” flag, so that the program executes quietly without asking questions, e.g.:
bigpicture -q “C:\My Photos”
Each filename is decided by the place of the photo in the photo series (in this example, the second photo), and the picture’s original filename (“cassini2.jpg”). It is worth noting that with many photo series, numbers in the original filename will not correspond to the picture’s place in the photo series, so a filename like “01 – mars24.jpg” doesn’t indicate that the program has skipped 23 photos.
It is also worth noting that the program resumes downloading a collection intelligently – if a download of the series is interrupted, you can resume where it left off simply by re-running the program, giving it the same directory to save photos in. The same is true of updating your collection with new photos.
As of May 2010, the collection is approximately 2GB in size.
Changelog:
0.5: Fixed bug relating to HTML inside captions, and a few other minor improvements.
0.4: Fixed critical bug that caused BPC to hang on galleries with names ending with a full stop. Disabled online error reporting (deemed unnecessary). Various other improvements.
0.3: Added the -q command-line switch, so users can schedule the program to run automatically and without prompts. First release of source code.
0.2: Fixed some fatal Unicode bugs.
0.1: Initial Release.
Download (v0.5):
Source Code (Mac OS X / Linux) - Unavailable until further notice
Important information pertaining to the source (Dependencies, licence, etc.)
More information (original blog post)
