ericruby.com

Eric reached out to me with an idea he'd been nursing for a long time- to create a fake version of google to house his immense archive of photography of over 10,000 images.

Users can sort by a few criteria and view large-scale images or a grid of images.

So we needed to make Eric's images searchable. He had already been keywording his images- adding keywords to each image's metadata for his own use. So I wanted to utilize these keywords and create a search index from them.

I found a tool called exifTool which can extract metadata from images programmatically. Then I built a script that runs on Eric's server every night and goes through all of his images, extracting the keywords from each, and building an index data file for use by the website. It also creates thumbnail versions of each image so they can lazy load and make things run smoother.

This is an index listing every single keyword Eric has added to any of his images.