fuse-jpeg-preview

virtual filesystem containing all preview images or thumbnails of a source filesystem - using Fuse / Perl

motivation

• I have a digital camera making pictures with a size of up to 10MB each (6000x4000 pixels).
• Sometimes I want to browse through a bunch of pictures using my old netbook which has a display of 1024x600 and is quite slow.
• I found that the metadata of the images (EXIF) contains preview images of 1616x1080

solution

• This virtual filesystem clones the structure of a source filesystem containing jpeg files, but only passes the preview images through.
• File attributes (file size) are dynamically replaced by the size of the preview picture of the image.
• You can use any application to open and display the preview images of the destination filesystem.
• Less data needs to be read and processed/scaled and so displaying images is much faster.

dependencies

• libfuse-perl
• libimage-exiftool-perl

usage

call the script using

./fuse-jpeg-preview.pl src dst

the images in the directory 'src' now show up in the directory 'dst' containing only the small preview images:

$ ls -sh1 src
total 20M
9,5M 00451.jpg
9,8M 00452.jpg

$ exiftool -ImageSize src/00451.jpg 
Image Size                      : 6000x4000

$ ls -sh1 dst
total 1,6M
777K 00451.jpg
837K 00452.jpg

$ exiftool -ImageSize dst/00451.jpg 
Image Size                      : 1616x1080

to unmount, use:

fusermount -u dst

limitations

The implementation is single-threaded.

The destination filesystem is read-only. No modifying operations are implemented (move, rename and delete could be helpful).