Image Perfect

📚 Table Of Contents

• ❓ Why I Built Image Perfect
• ℹ️ About
• 👀 Core Features
• 📷 Screen Shots
• ⚠️ Important Metadata Note
• 🖥️ System Requirements
• 🚀 Quick Start Windows
• 🚀 Quick Start Ubuntu
• 🔍 User Guide
• 🧰 Planned Improvements
• 🖥️ MySQL Server Setup Windows
• 🖥️ MySQL Server Setup Ubuntu
• 📋 Build And Install Directions
• 📊 Backing Up And Restoring The MySQL Database
• 📦 Migrating To A New Computer
• 📚 Tech Stack And Notable Dependencies
• 🪪 License
• 📢 Feedback And Contributions

❓Why I Built Image Perfect

I built Image Perfect as a modern, high-performance alternative to Shotwell on Linux. While Shotwell remains a solid photo manager for smaller collections, it struggles to scale efficiently with very large libraries. Image Perfect was designed to overcome that limitation and focus on performance and usability.

Image Perfect’s goals are:

1. Handle large libraries efficiently — no long import times or excessive memory usage.

2. Provide excellent folder organization — intuitive, fast, and file-system aware.

3. Deliver a great viewing experience — large in-app previews (up to 600 px), not tiny thumbnails.

4. Enable easy migration from Shotwell — Image Perfect reads image metadata to recover tags and ratings.

📌 Note: To import your Shotwell tags and ratings, ensure that Shotwell is configured to write this information to image files.

ℹ️ About

Image Perfect is a high-performance, cross-platform (Windows + Ubuntu) image viewer and photo management tool designed for massive image libraries. Whether you're organizing thousands or millions of photos, Image Perfect stays fast, responsive, and efficient.

Written in C#, using Avalonia UI, MySQL, and the MVVM architecture pattern. The app emphasizes speed, clean design, direct file system folder organization, and scalable performance — avoiding the long import times and tiny thumbnails in traditional photo managers.

Key features include:

• Large adjustable thumbnails (up to 600px wide)
• Smooth performance with huge libraries
• Rich tagging and folder-based organization
• Direct image viewing (no thumbnails written to disk)

💡 Future Plans: Image Perfect is — and will always be — free and open source at its core. In the future, I may offer an optional Pro version with extra features like duplicate detection or AI-powered facial recognition to help fund development. Your feedback now helps shape what both the free and Pro versions might look like — so please share your thoughts!

👀 Core Features

🖼️ Big Thumbnails

• Adjustable image widths from 400px to 600px
• Images are displayed directly (no caching or writing thumbnails to disk)

🏷️ Tagging & ⭐ Rating

• Tag and rate images and folders
• Image tags/ratings saved in both the file and the database
• Folder tags/ratings, and description stored in the database only
• Select cover images for folders
• Add image tags individually or in bulk (folder bulk tagging planned)
• Folder and image Tags can be removed one at a time or in bulk.
  • Bulk operation removes tag across the entire database.
  • Removing tags from individual images and folders is done one at a time.

🗲 Speed with Large Libraries

• No long import times thanks to MySqlBulkLoader (insert data from a csv file)
• New folders must be manually added (no auto-monitoring)
  • To avoid double imports the app will check if you selected folders that are already in the library.
• Metadata scanning is user-initiated
  • Bulk photo import and metadata scanning per folder or filtered set

📂 File System Mirroring

• Move, rename, and manage folders/images inside the app — changes reflected in the file system.

  • Current File System Capabilities

    • Move, create, and delete folders
    • Import newly added folders (images must be present)
    • Delete individual or multiple images
    • Move individual or multiple images

  • File System Capabilities To Add

    • Rename folders

  • File System Issue/Bug/Limitations (Limitations have no plan to be "Fixed". Workarounds will be provided)

    • Known limitation: Folders imported containing only ZIP files cannot be opened.
      • To fix delete the folder in app, unzip the files and then re-import it.
    • Known limitation: On Ubuntu/Linux, where the filesystem is case-sensitive, importing folders named e.g., Photos/BeachTrip and Photos/beachtrip causes both folders to show each other's contents.
      • When adding a library or new folders; any folders with the same name but different case will not be imported. A log file "case_conflict_folders.txt" will list the date and folders not imported. From there users must rename the folders and then import them.

📷 Shotwell Import

• Import existing tags and ratings from Shotwell (if written to images)

🪪 License

Image Perfect is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0).

You are free to use, modify, and distribute this software under the terms of the AGPL. If you modify and publicly distribute the software — including via a hosted service — you must make your source code available under the same license.

License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0)

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📘 Full Documentation: See the docs/ folder for complete guides on installation, configuration, and usage.