I have been reading/watching a lot about git over the last couple days and I have been wondering about the other applications of a git type system for files other than text file.  Git was designed to keep track of changes to files in a distributed development project.  Because files change over time it is necessary to update these files across several user’s computers.  The thing that I was thinking of tracking is photos.

One of the problems that I have with photo organization software is that the meta data gets put into the program but there isn’t a way to get this data back out of the program.  So if I tag something in Picasa the Flickr Uploadr doesn’t know about those tags.  However, if we had an XML or text file based system that was used to keep track of these pieces of meta information all the systems could read them.  The only issue is that programs would need to support reading this information.

Another option is that (like Picasa) we can scatter ini or xml files in each folder to keep track of some of this information.  However, git has an excellent method of holding all this information in a hidden directory at the root of the repository.  Then in order to remove the project from git you just delete this folder and you don’t have to hunt down a hundred CVS/SVN folders.  This keeps the file system really clean so people don’t have to worry about it.

I think I’m going to look into this more over the next couple days and see what I come up with.