Support to ignore files by pattern similar to .gitignore

Hi,

I want to be able to ignore files/directories using patterns, similar to .gitignore Git - gitignore Documentation

I hope this makes sense :slight_smile:

2 Likes

I would also like this feature. Another good reference is the “.plexignore” file that plex uses to ignore files or patterns.

My use case is that I have many photographs scanned from the 20th century, and whenever there’s writing on the backs of the pictures I scan that as well. Those images are saved with the suffix “xxxx-description.jpg”.

So I would like to specify images with the word “description” be ignored by photostructure. (I have a couple other file patterns I want ignored as well.)

1 Like

Files whose filenames match *description*, correct?

Or do you mean it should match on a metadata tag value?

Yes, please ignore files whose filenames match *description*.

Oops, I missed your filename example in the line above… :man_facepalming:

I mean, if I was wanting extra credit, PhotoStructure would associate the description image to the asset as a non-primary asset file: then your could open the asset info panel and tap the -description.jpg to read the backside…

Yes that would be a nice extra credit feature!

But the ability to ignore files by pattern is still a wanted feature. For example, I have many images with “noplex” in the filename that I don’t want in my photostructure library. I also have files named “photo-release” that I don’t want in my library (and I need to keep them in the folder where they live).

:+1: I will build this, but it has to get in the work queue behind shipping v1.0 and shipping hide/delete and face detection (and sharing and …)

2 Likes

I second the ability to ignore path patterns.

As I am just starting to familiarise with PhotoStructure, I just unleashed it at my work NAS to gain a bird’s eye view of all the media in there scattered across hundreds of project directories.

To give you an example, one directory contains thousands of frames from a video, as part of a workflow. Stuff like this is what I’d like to skip.

A related thought is the use a of a whitelist: point PS as a drive but tell it to only look for certain patterns. For example a **/Documentation/ directory expected to exist under hundreds of subpaths. Closest thing I can think of is Rsync’s --include --exclude options.

What I’ve done, personally, is to go visit that directory, and touch .nomedia (details here), and then manually re-sync that directory (or the parent directory, as I’ll have cleaned up a couple of those directories) via the sync tool.

So, say you wanted to hide ~/src/project/Documentation:

touch ~/src/project/Documentation/.nomedia
~/photostructure-for-servers/photostructure sync ~/src/project

assuming you were using PhotoStructure for Node. For PhotoStructure for Docker, you’d run something like

docker exec -it photostructure sh
./photostructure sync /mounted/path/to/src/project

The batched version of this would be

find . -name Documentation -type d -exec touch {}/.nomedia \;

(but this is squirting empty files into all your documentation dirs, hence the somewhat horrible aspect of this solution…)

In case you missed it, there’s an asset import filter that I turn on, personally, but defaults to false, and might help you here: it’s the requireMakeModel library setting. Assuming the images in your documentation has been minimized (and therefore stripped of most metadata), they won’t have Make and Model metadata tags, and they’ll be skipped if this setting is true.

Dang, I hadn’t thought about the .nomedia file. That can work as an ingore, and I suppose I could “review” by running find --name .nomedia or some such.

What I meant about the /volume/projectX/Documentation/ was more along the lines of a .yesmedia. Like “I only want dirs called Documentation to be scanned”.

But please don’t read this bit as a feature request, because it’s not. It’s just to toss it here and perhaps give you some ideas about weird alien workflows and edge cases as PhotoStructure gains more users.