One of the biggest annoyances I have with Nautilus, and with image viewers/managers in general, is the distinct lack of the ability to sort by image properties such as geometry (width/height), bits per pixel (aka color depth), and aspect ratio.

I started to look at ways I could extend Nautilus to add the features I want and I stumbled across Dave Camp’s blog on Nautilus extensions and providers. As chance would have it, the same night I discovered this Jorge met Dave at Linux World in Boston. Small world.

I grabbed the libnautilus-vcs module from GNOME CVS, which served as a good example of how a Nautilus extension worked, and I now have the functional framework of libnautilus-pr0n (named lovely after the geek term for porn). I want to add a collection of media-related features to Nautilus. The most important feature to me is the ability to sort based on aspect ratio, since I have two wide-screen displays and hunting through unsorted images for ones that will fit a 16:9 display can be a pain. Once I started thinking about it I realized how many other cool things I could add. The ability to sort by color depth (useful for finding black & white photos), perhaps even exif data. Maybe even extend it to audio and video, so you can sort by track length or video dimensions. the possibilities are endless.

Heck, maybe I can even get it included with Nautilus at some point (though I have no idea where to begin with that process).

Here’s a little screenshot of the Visible Columns dialog in Nautilus, with two of my columns included. I still need to write the code to display the data but I have the hooks in place for them.