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_1234567820261019_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:
- Diceware and the EFF diceware lists
- Some bitcoin folks created 2048 words that are uniquely identified by the first 4 letters of the word
- a lot of default usernames take the form
adjective-noun, but I don't know where they get their wordlist - router default passwords
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.
I think you should use a DAM instead. I use digiKam and it works really well. When I import photos I create a sub-folder with the YYYY/YYYY-MM - Subject, and rename the pictures to YYYY-MM-dd_hhmmss_ms.ext. Then I tag the photos with as many tags as I want and make sure they're geo-tagged. I then go through and cull the photos with the picker and delete the photos that don't make the cut. All of the metadata is written to a sidecar file, so I never change the actual image file. You might even be able to rename the photos to include a main tag.
ETA:
I recommend DK because you're already talking about touching every photo by hand anyway. DK would seem to make the most sense for the file name changes you want to make. You also mentioned Darktable. While this program has tagging/renaming (DAM) abilities, it's primary use case is as a photo editor similar to Lightroom, but, admittedly with a learning curve. DigiKam is primarily a DAM with photo editing capabilities. Ideally, one would use dK for the DAM, and DT (running in memory mode, or no DB) for editing.