curator/README.md

Curator

A program to manage the collections for Art Museum.

Curator is the program used to manage collections on the Art Museum website. It is a Java program that you run locally on your computer. It allows you to upload, edit, and delete the media and albums that appear on the website.

Curator exists as a separate program that your run locally to keep the website as light as possible. Things such as image, video, and audio metadata processing, thumbnail generation, and file type conversion are handled locally, sparing the server hosting Art Museum from having to have any such helper programs installed.

Curator uses FTP or SFTP to upload media to the web server. The FTP user needs to have write access to the data directory used for Art Museum in order to successfully upload media.

Curator has a build in help system. Just click the question mark (?) button in any dialog and the built-in help system will open to the page most relavant to what you are trying to do.

Building

Curator uses Gradle as a build system. Thus, building is done with gradle build. Any required dependencies will be automatically downloaded and compiled by Gradle. Generating video thumbnails and converting Apple .mov files requires the ffmpeg command line utility.

Curator has been tested on Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS. A .desktop file (for Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and a script to build a MacOS .app file is available under the scripts directory. Note that installing ffmpeg with Homebrew on MacOS does NOT automatically add it to the launchd $PATH environment variable. Thus, the .app file will not be able to find it unless you manually add it.