README

:chocolate_bar: chocolate-bars readme

Present histograms (bars!) of images in a directory, including extras such as exif data from the camera. Star and move favorite images.

Electron based app - so, it runs on node.js.

status - stable

chocolate-bars is stable on Windows, Linux Ubuntu (Mac is possible but not tested). Releases follow semantic versioning.

why?

Histograms are useful for finding image defects such as:

over-exposure
under-exposure
low contrast

Also was curious how to implement this in node.js. And - I really miss the 'moved starred images' feature of good ole' Picasa

dependencies

Node 10.18.0 or higher

dependencies for Windows

We use sharp to resize images during processing. sharp requires node-gyp to build, so you will need to install Microsoft's windows-build-tools using this command:

npm install --global --production windows-build-tools

features

scan a folder of images and present a browsable summary
show image thumbnails and histogram
show additional image properties such as file size, image size
show exif tags where available (JPEG files)
'star' images in a folder like in Picasa
move previously 'starred' images to a new folder
delete the selected image
handles large number of images (2000+) and sub-directories, via paging
supports JPEG, PNG file formats
correctly handles JPEG image orientation (from EXIF)

usage - as cli (command line tool)

View Images and Get chocolate bars (histograms)

Screenshot

ways to run

You can run chocolate-bars in one of two ways:

a) as a globally installed command line tool
OR b) from the source code

a) install globally as a command line tool

npm i -g electron@4

npm i -g chocolate-bars@latest --production

note: on Ubuntu you may need to prefix the above commands with sudo:

sudo npm i -g electron@4

sudo npm i -g chocolate-bars@latest --production

To use:

chocolate-bars [--imageDir=<path to image directory>] [--subDirs]

where --subDirs means also view images in sub directories.

This can be abbreviated to:

chocolate-bars [--i=<path to image directory>] [--s]

note: If --imageDir (or --i) is not given, then chocolate-bars will try to open the default photos folder, depending on the OS.

For a full list of options, see the built-in help:

chocolate-bars --help

b) from the source code

yarn

On Windows: use a bash shell like git bash.

To test your installation:

./test.sh

To check your images:

./go.sh --imageDir=<path to image direcory>

example:

./go.sh --imageDir=../myPhotos --subDirs

where --subDirs means also view images in sub directories.

For a full list of options, see the built-in help:

./go.sh --help

keyboard shortcuts

A number of keyboard shortcuts are available:

Area	Key	Action
Images panel	Up Arrow, Down Arrow	Scroll up or down the set of images.
Images panel	Space	Scroll down the set of images.
Selected image, Expanded image*	+	Toggle the expanded view of the image.
Selected image, Expanded image*	* or Enter	Toggle the star for that image.
Expanded image*	Left Arrow	Show the previous image.
Expanded image*	Right Arrow	Show the next image.
Expanded image*	Delete	Prompt to delete the expanded image.
Expanded image*	Escape	Close the expanded image.

* An image is expanded by clicking on the small orange box in the top-right of the image.

references

image data

sites

site	URL
source code (github)	https://github.com/mrseanryan/chocolate-bars
github page	https://mrseanryan.github.io/chocolate-bars/
npm	https://www.npmjs.com/package/chocolate-bars

developing code in this repository

see the contributing readme.

origin

This project is based on the excellent seeder project typescript-library-starter.

libaries

chocolate-bars uses the ExifReader library.

ORIGINAL readme (from the seeder project)

see here

authors

Original work by Sean Ryan - mr.sean.ryan(at gmail.com)

licence = MIT

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details

Usage no npm install needed!