orbital VS exiftool-vendored.js

I tried to make 2 different desktop apps in 2021 and failed at both.

Atomic Edits[0] is a desktop app that helps YouTubers (like me) automatically remove silence in videos. It went viral on Reddit[1] but I realized later that building a video editing app with Electron (and not C++) was a bad choice. Library support video/audio editing was lacking.

Recut[2] is an app that basically does what Atomic Edits aimed to do, but actually succeeded. I think it's because it was a native Mac app which meant it had access to better libraries for editing videos. (That or I gave up too early on Atomic Edits.)

Orbital[3] is desktop app that allows you to search, filter, preview video files on your computer like YouTube. I posted on some subreddits and it had potential but I realized it wouldn't be enough to sustain me. It could've worked as a side-project but being as my main source of income was from YouTube ad-revenue, it wasn't worth it.

VideoHubApp[4] is a desktop app that does what Orbital aimed to do and actually earned a couple thousand dollars. It was started a few years earlier and was built with a similar tech stack.

All that is to say, I made desktop apps that had potential, but I did not have the time to spend making them feature complete.

[0] https://github.com/SuboptimalEng/atomic-edits

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/ohbl6i/i_made_a_des...

[2] https://getrecut.com/

[3] https://github.com/SuboptimalEng/orbital

[4] https://videohubapp.com/en/

As for the project, it’s open source - meaning the code is available for all to see, update, and report issues on GitHub (https://github.com/SuboptimalEng/Orbital).

Know that although ExifTool is written in perl, you can run it in "batch mode" which makes it quite fast--only a couple of ms to parse a file. I've written an open source library to manage the subprocesses for you if you're using node.js (and I also wrote the ruby variant ages ago):

https://github.com/photostructure/exiftool-vendored.js

The frontend is in Vue. Both the FE and BE are in TypeScript.

Parallelism is provided by https://github.com/photostructure/batch-cluster.js/

Metadata reads and writes are via https://github.com/photostructure/exiftool-vendored.js/

My more nerdier blog posts are tagged here: https://photostructure.com/tags/coding/

if you're looking into doing stuff with EXIF, there's a really good library that's also typed: https://github.com/photostructure/exiftool-vendored.js

I needed a good Node wrapper for ExifTool and wrote https://github.com/photostructure/exiftool-vendored.js

When I saw how slow it is to fork child processes in Windows, I then realized I wanted to run ExifTool in "stay-open" mode, which meant I needed to manage 1 or more long-lived child processes that communicate via stdin/stdout, so I wrote https://github.com/photostructure/batch-cluster.js

I also really missed scala's `lazy` operator, so I built that (and several other small, helpful functions/classes) that I documented here: https://photostructure.com/coding/uncertain-lazy-forgetful-a...