Filter photos the grep way with the photogrep GUI tool

Programming Snapshot – photogrep

© Lead Image © Venkova, 123RF.com

© Lead Image © Venkova, 123RF.com

Article from Issue 292/2025
Author(s):

The photogrep GUI tool, built using Go and Fyne, is designed to filter photos just like the grep tool filters file names from a pipe.

The idea of pipes is one of the most powerful and versatile functions of the Unix command line. A pipe delivers the output from one tool into the input of the next, which, in turn, extracts interesting parts and passes those on to the next section of the pipeline to a further processing step. The fact that this invention never won a Nobel Prize is quite simply scandalous.

The grep command-line tool often plays a key role in such pipe processing, because it filters out unwanted entries between two connected pipe ends, keeping the good bits and dumping the bad ones into a black hole. When it comes to filtering strings, text replacement or regular expressions are massively useful, but what criteria can you use to sort photos? Which ones are beautiful and which ones are blurred, have a color cast, or simply have bad composition?

This kind of decision is (still) best made by a human being. The photogrep tool I will be discussing in this month's column fetches the photos from the stdin pipe and displays them on screen where you can select one or more of them with a mouse click. As soon as you press the Submit button, photogrep writes the names of the selected images to the standard output – hey presto, grep with photos.

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