Rewriting a photo tagger in Go
Programming Snapshot – Go Photo Tagger

© Lead Image © Erik Reis, 123RF.com
In honor of the 25th anniversary of his Programming Snapshot column, Mike Schilli revisits an old problem and solves it with Go instead of Perl.
Hurray! This issue marks the 25th anniversary of my "Programming Snapshot" column, which first appeared in the German edition of Linux Magazine back in October 1997 (originally under the "Perl Snapshot" banner). Times have changed: Now the featured programs in this column mainly use Go, but you might also see Ruby, Python, or even TeX, as was the case recently.
For this dinosaur birthday party, I thought I might rewrite a tool I put together in Perl back in the dot-com era, but looking at it from today's perspective in Go. The photo tagger from 2003 (it was called Image Database [1] or idb
for short) is something I've been wanting to use again for a long time.
The idb
tool assigns one or more tags to a set of photo files, distributed over arbitrary subdirectories somewhere on the hard drive. Once tagged with the tool, the same program can retrieve the photos if you provide the name of the desired tag. The problem with the old Perl code, though, is that you need both the time and the inclination to go through the installation and dependency hell of all the Perl modules used by it. Moreover, many years have passed since then, and some CPAN module developers have broken backward compatibility by changing the original programming interfaces. Luckily, it's 2022, and Go has solved these kinds of installation problems for all time, as you can compile static binaries that run on similar architectures.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.