Next Steps

Instead of starting the application with npm start, the electron-builder add-on package bundles it into a binary. This contains everything you need, including the Chromium browser and libraries on which the project depends. However, the electron-builder package requires a newer Node.js version than the one provided by Ubuntu 16.04. If you like, you can install it from the official Node.js repository.

The results can be easily copied from host to host in file format and run perfectly on similar architectures. If you want to search for images in the current directory rather than the images directory, you will want to set the string in line 39 of Listing 3 to process.cwd() after on-boarding the appropriate module with require('process').

Changing Platform

If you want to transfer it to another platform, for example the Mac, just call npm install and npm start there in the same directory, and you will be surprised: The whole thing works perfectly with the usual GUI conventions. A bundle of joy.

The book Cross-Platform Desktop Applications using Electron and NW.js [5], as well as the blog posting by Jessica Lord [6], offer a good starting point for anyone who now can't resist the urge to delve deeper into the subject of GUI programming with Electron.

One useful addition to the iNuke application would be to insert tags into photos. The good photos of a Hawaii vacation would then be assigned a tag of hawaii 2018, and portrait photos tagged with the name of the person depicted, and so on. Following this step, a search program could easily retrieve them later.

A few buttons with tag names on the GUI's right side that insert a tag into the Exif area of the current photo, plus a New Tag button to help you create new tags – how hard can that be? We may well see.