[Gimp-gui] Auto-generated tags for brushes

[Elle Stone <ellestone ninedegreesbelow com>]

Hi All,

It would be nice if GIMP brush metadata could hold the 
author/copyright/source url/other? information for each brush.

It would be really nice if certain tags for brushes could be generated 
automatically, including:

1. Type of brush - gih, vbr, or gbr (also abr? these are handled 
differently?)

2. Approximate size of brush - I use these groupings for "size" tags, 
using the long dimension for brushes that aren't square:
    ~32px (and anything smaller)
    ~64px
    ~128px
    ~256px
    ~512px (and anything bigger)

    So for example 100px brushes go in the 128px category and 80px 
brushes go in the 64px category.

3. Author of brush

4. Other?


Right now tags are generated automatically for brushes in folders. So 
the way I made the above-suggested tags "automatically" for my (overly 
large) collection of GIMP brushes was by taking advantage of the fact 
that GIMP makes folder tags for brushes:

1. Size of brush folders/tags: I install GIMP from source in a prefix. 
So the first step was to copy the "installed by default" brushes from 
the "share/gimp/2.0/brushes/" folder over to the "config/brushes" 
folder. Then I erased the default brushes from the "share" installation 
folder, and I erase these newly-again-installed brushes from the "share" 
folder every time I reinstall GIMP.

Then I moved brushes in each size category into top-level "size" brushes 
folders: 32px, 64px, 128px, 256px, 512px (a process made quite tedious 
by the inability to read metadata from brush files - I think size is 
already in the metadata, yes?).

2. Type of brush subfolder/tags: I set up folders for VBR, GIH (and 
GBR?) brushes, by making "vbr", "gih", and "gbr" subfolders for each 
"size" folder, and then moving each "already sorted into size folders" 
brush into the appropriate "brush size" folder.

With just these two tags - size and brush type - it's *much* easier to 
find a suitable brush, than without these two tags. Maybe there could be 
at least one VBR brush per size category, or else VBR should have a 
folder on the same level as the "size" folders, which is what I do right 
now.

3. Author of brush subsubfolder/tags: I also set up subsubfolders for 
each "brush type" subfolder indicating the source/author of each brush, 
whether from default GIMP, Americo, Vasco, Cazu, and etc.


So that's a lot of folders that I set up to hold my GIMP brushes. But 
once done it has made finding a given brush a lot easier. And of course 
I've added some additional user-generated tags that only get saved in 
the xml file. But at least for me, "size/type/author" is a quick way to 
get to a desired brush.

I think many people would find the above-suggested "auto-generated" 
size, type, and author brushes very convenient.

Anyone have thoughts/additions/negative comments/positive comments?

Best,
Elle

--
https://ninedegreesbelow.com
Color management and free/libre photography