SQLite is an ubiquitous and well-tested piece of software that is going to stand the test of time and survive the next twenty years. There are very few pieces of software that I am able to praise like that with a clean conscience; SQLite is definitely one of them though. You might find it worthwhile to read e.g. about its memory allocation strategy, or its testing strategy.
Also, I don't think that the image files themselves are stored in the SQLite DB file; likely just their indices and metadata.
> SQLite is an ubiquitous and well-tested piece of software that is going to stand the test of time and survive the next twenty years.
My timeline is much longer than 20 years. I have family photos going back to the Civil War.
Besides, Wordstar and Wordperfect files used to be ubiquitous. Good luck with those today.
I switched my mail from Outlook to Thunderbird because the former stores the email in some undocumented unreadable binary format. TB stores the mail as text, so I can recover the mail without needing TB. I have mail going back 25 years now. Some of my earlier mail is now lost because, surprise surprise, the mail program no longer works and the data is stored in a proprietary format.
I unzipped all my old file archives a few years back out of concern that some of the old DOS archive software would disappear.
What storage format do you use then? Are you concerned about Hard drives format becoming obsolete? Are you using Mac or Windows? What if tomorow Apple or Microsoft decide to stop support for their formats? What would you consider as a reliable Storage format? Do you trust linux formats ext3 ext4?
What would be your ideal choice looking from your perspective which I really share. It's really a big question for me how reliably store things for long periods of time.
I copy them forward to new media every year or so. It's how I avoid bit rot and media obsolescence.
My files have survived magtapes, DECtapes, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, zip drives, CDs, DVDs, blurays, 6 Mb hard disks (yes, 6 megabytes!), many no-longer-readable hard drives, and that about covers it.
Just keep copying them forward, and rotate among more than one drive.
My experience is that every media device and every media format becomes unreadable after a few years.
I learned programming on punch cards. I wish I'd kept my punch card decks, but they'd be unreadable by now. Unreadable by machine, that is, I could decode them by hand.
I hope you at least have at least 1 on site and one off site and 1 physical media backup of all those if you want to keep them for the next few generations...
For how much longer? And how much resources do you imagine will be spend to fix bugs/issues opening these files? I don't think this example is strong enough to deserve a mocking wink
notes.txt will work just fine, then, even for several thousand photos. I don't see a need for a database until you've got far more than that. The tree file system works tolerably well as a "database".
As for searching, I know how to use "grep" and "locate".
Tags are more flexible than folders. An actual index let's you search by tag. Folders don't let you search for all photos of your mother, or in 1987, or in Alabama, or some combination thereof.
Folders are a limiting api and we shouldn't limit ourselves to strictly hierarchical organizational structures for non hierarchal data.
I know, but folders work perfectly fine even up to a few thousand files. It doesn't take me long to find a vacation picture from 1966, for example. I look in the 1966 folder, which doesn't have a lot in it. The preview thumbnails from file explorer quickly let me hone in.
It'd take me far more time to set up a proper tag database than I'd save looking things up.
It's still infinitely better than a random shoebox with random snapshots in it.
Looking up something by its clustered index is indeed pretty easy. That's not the only access pattern into most data sets, which is where tags can be handy.
I agree with your last two points, as my family's digital photos are also stored in a fairly similar clustered index style where you have to know the date at least pretty closely to start your search unless you want to scan "all Thanksgivings" [which itself is just a series of clustered index lookups]
Also, I don't think that the image files themselves are stored in the SQLite DB file; likely just their indices and metadata.