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I am trying to solve a specific problem that has some other applications.

My specific problem is I want to add an English word to every file from my camera. The files come in like [date]_time.jpg. Although I think the best workflow involves using a photo management app like DarkTable, sometimes you just want to quickly browse your filesystem and grab the original image. Browsing just by datetime creates problems when you take two very similar images seconds apart. It takes a lot of effort determining which is which. And if you pick out your best picture from a shoot, you then have to mentally note you want timestamp _12345678 and find it in your folder.

I think it would be smoother to have files like:

  • 20261019_cape_12345678
  • 20261019_echo_12346678

In my specific case, 100 unique words is the absolute minimum, with 500-2000 words being more comfortable.

This is trivial if you have a "wordlist", a list of words you find suitable for the task. And there's the rub. What's a good wordlist? I can hack one together myself but I'm hoping some top minds have thought about this.

Some prior art that I've found is:

This task is nontrivial in my use case. Words can:

  • evoke computers - copy, original, resize, error, fail, process, base, cat, category, data, base, idle, arm
  • evoke other common file formats - album, music, song, camera, photo, video
  • evoke the contents of an image or file - cool, neat, tree, car, sky, beautiful, best, trip
  • evoke common filenames and extensions - wave
  • be full on offensive
  • be offensive in some contexts, as well as have a negative connotation in the most literal sense: bad, corrupt, awful, awkward, bomb

This is partly an "I know it when I see it" problem, but I'm kind of looking for the 500 blandest, most non-ideological English words there are.

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[-] Pomal@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago

Why not just use metadata headers for the file and throw in actual descriptions?

[-] canaryWart@programming.dev 1 points 4 days ago

You spend a lot of time writing metadata descriptions for your photo sets?

[-] Pomal@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago

They’re already proposing processing photos in DarkTable, which takes it’s own degree of care and enables this inherently. Then any search can find the necessary data.

I spend a lot of time wrangling disparate datasets.

[-] canaryWart@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

Fair point. Glazed over because I didn't recognise the name. If you don't mind me asking, work or pleasure?

[-] Pomal@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2026
33 points (90.2% liked)

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