Shell Game Image Sorter

This is a small program for manually arranging images in a specific order. After the images have been sorted as desired, the program can export the order by prepending the file names with numbers. Thus, the Shell Game Image Sorter allows using custom orders of images in programs that would otherwise only support alphabetical order.

The Shell Game Image Sorter is written in Python2 on top of the PyQt library. It runs (should run) on any platform supported by both Python and PyQt, including Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

Screenshot

Installation

• Download and install version 2.x of the Python programming language.
• Download and install the PyQt4 libraries.
• Download and extract, or checkout the contents of this repository.
• Compile the user interface description into a Python class by running the command python2-pyuic4 shellgamesorter.ui > shellgamesorter_ui.py in the directory containing shellgamesorter.ui.

Usage

• Start the program by running the shellgamesorter.py script with the Python 2.x interpreter. On Linux, the command is python2 shellgamesorter.py.

• Open the directory containing the images you want to sort. For example, consider a directory that contains the following files:

  1. chickenshellgame.jpg
  2. shell_game.jpg
  3. shellgame.jpg

  The program window will show thumbnails for all images in the directory, sorted by name.

  

• Sort the images using drag and drop. Dropping an image A onto another image B moves A before B in the list. Dropping an image past the end of the list moves it to the end of the list.

  

  

• Select Apply order in the File menu to export the ordering. The program will ask you to select a target directory. All files will be copied to that directory. The name of the copy will start with a prefix such that the alphabetical order equals the current order in the program. In our example, the target directory will contain the files:

  1. 0@shell_game.jpg
  2. 1@shellgame.jpg
  3. 2@chickenshellgame.jpg

  Using the Save order and Load order commands in the File menu, you can also save the current state into a file and restore it later.

License

Copyright (c) 2011--2012 Peter Dinges. The Shell Game Image Sorter is available under the open-source MIT License.