Littlesnapper - Image tagger and organiser
Overview:
Littlesnapper by RealMac software is one of my favourite indy apps. It’s developing purpose is definitely slanted towards web designers, as it has the functionality to capture full-page screenshots of websites and has some edit functionality for annotating. However I use Littlesnapper for something a bit more general.
Basically Littesnapper is a great tagger app. It’s beautifully designed and really simple to use. I use it to organise a plethora of images, for different purposes and through clever organisation it allows you to find what you need efficiently. See my crude flow below.
I use Littlesnapper for:
1, Inspiration – Any great, inspiring image I come across on the web or take a photo with on my phone.
2, Project Based Inspiration – Similar to inspiration but a little more specific only allotting images that relate to a project.. e.g. Porbeagle.
3, Concepts – These are concepts that I create and archive for reference and for establishing style/ maintaining themes I developed early on etc…
4, Stock Textures – This collection is for texture images I take with my slr, usually close ups of fabrics, concrete – just general textures. I can refer to these images when a texture is needed for a certain element in the film for texturing in 3D or for stylistic purposes.
So firstly you just drag images into littlesnapper. By default they go into the ‘Unprocessed’ folder. Here you add tags and ratings to the image. Once done they go into the library. The library houses all the images, organised by date only. You can make smart collections which are basically filters. You can define a Smart Collection to only have images with the tag: ‘concept’ for example, so any image in your library with the tag ‘concept’ will be filtered when you activate that collection…. but it’s not destructive as the original images still reside in the library.
You can also make Smart Collections more specifically, i.e. more than one tag, or a tag and a rating of above 3 etc… Whilst inside of a smart collection you can also use the search bar to filter your results down even more if you have a lot of images there.
In Conclusion:
Littlesnapper is really simple and awesome. It’s great to have a seemingly unorganised dump of images in the library so all images are in the same place. You’re not navigating through folders and folders looking for what you want, you just click on a collection or search a tag. You can also sync your library using DropBox. If there’s one thing that I wish the app was able to do is Video. I’d love to be able to stick video in there for the same kind of organisation and previewing. If it had that functionality it would be my hub for the film’s footage and inspiration too. Instead of having folders with scene numbers. I’d chuck them all in there and tag them with the scene name and descriptions, that way I can find a scene/clip by searching a description of it and wont have to consult a shot list. Would be much faster.
Check out Littlesnapper here: http://realmacsoftware.com/littlesnapper/
Syncing Applications using Dropbox
This is a really cool little tip, if you’re an avid user of library driven software in the vain of GTD to-do lists, image libraries and want to access the software (and the all the new content you’ve added to them) from any of your computers dynamically.
Ok i’m already assuming you have your own dropbox account, and is all set-up on all your desired computers….if not, firstly head over to getdropbox.com, sign-up and set it up.
This technique works with quite a few different software, i personally use it for, ‘Things‘, ‘The Hit List‘ and ‘Littlesnapper. But i’m sure you can try it on other apps to see if they support it.
For this demonstration, i’m going to use Cultured Codes, ‘Things’.
Step 1
Firstly close down the application if it’s running, and instead hold alt (option key) and click on the Things icon in your dock.
You’ll get a little pop-up asking you to Choose Things Library. Click ‘Create’ and navigate over to your Dropbox folder on your computer. I like to create a new folder to keep all the libraries separate, so i call it ‘Things-sync’, press ‘Create’, press save and we have our new library built on our dropbox account.
Step 2
Now we need to boot-up the other computers that we wish to sync the software with. Make sure you have your dropbox account installed there too, and the same as before, alt+click on the Things icon in the dock. This time, instead of choosing ‘Create’, we click ‘Choose’. We locate the folder appropriately titled, ‘Things’, click open and there you have it. The app is synced up between two computers. Just follow the second step for syncing up more computers to the same application.
The only real difference you may see in doing this with other applications, is that they may solely save a library file. So when you choose the library from another computer, you will select that file and not the folder containing it. Enjoy!
