Project Girolamo
I keep coming back to the idea of finding a good way to manage photos with a computer. My first attempt dates from the late 80s, it felt like an obvious problem to tackle and, somehow, it remains so. Later, in the 2000's, after leaving the video games industry and before joining Intel, I came back to the topic knowing that a fast game UI could be a game changer. Multitouch wasn't a thing yet, and Jeff Han's TED talk inspired me to develop a UI that'd be all about zooming from overview to details. At Intel, this became deepViewer and let us investigate many forward-looking scenarios in a practical way. I ended up being dragged into other topics until I was hit by one of the regular reorgs. I briefly attempted an iPhone version in 2020, got hired again at Intel, got reorged again and, after that, spent a lot of time looking into various project ideas...
And, here I am, back at it. What changed? What can I hope to do differently? Well, obviously, the big thing that happened is LLMs. Around 2010, my team had put together an AlexNet integration, the ability to generate semi-reliable keywords was cool but reached its limits very quickly. Recently, I had a big ah-ha moment when I got LM_Studio to generate a title, a description and keywords from a photo. Everything was accurate, everything was relevant, for every photo I tried. And this was done with a model using ~3GB of disk space, running locally on my M2 mac, running even faster on my PC with a lowly RTX2060. Suddenly, indexing images is not different from indexing text, suddenly managing photos is about also managing pretty much any other kind of content. It's about creating an artificial archivist. Let's go !!!
I claim a project doesn't actually exist until it has a name. I have been looking for one for some time now, one that'd capture the spirit of the project, its roots but also that it isn't simply the same old trick all over again. It came as some form of epiphany when I went looking for famous archivists and discovered that, in France, the saint patron of archivists is... Saint Jérôme, San Girolamo in Italian.
Today this project has a name, Girolamo ; starting today, this project exists !