What’s In My Bag: Simple Tool for Linux Photographers

I don’t have have enough photographic equipment to use a dedicated application to keep tabs on it. But I do need a simple tool to store essential information about the camera, lenses, and whatnot in my bag. And since I couldn’t find anything that meets my particular needs, I cobbled together one myself.

If I’ve had a modicum of coding skills, I’d have built an Android app. But since I’m not a coder by any stretch of imagination, I settled for something more manageable: Python and the Bottle web framework. And because I only want to track the most essential info, I built the simplest tool possible.

Now that I can’t set your expectations any lower, I give you the What’s In My Bag (or WIMB for short) web-based app.

What’s In My Bag in all its bare-bones beauty

Even a quick glance at WIMB is enough to get a pretty good idea of what it does and how it works. You can add and manage entries, and each entry contains a brief description of an item, its serial number, and short note. That’s all there is to it. Since WIMB doesn’t feature any advanced functionality like search, pagination, password protection, and such, it’s better suited for keeping track of a limited number of items.

Since WIMB is based on the Python and Bottle combination, it can run on any platform that supports Python: from a regular Linux machine (or macOS X and Windows, for that matter) and web server, to an Android device. To deploy WIMB on your Linux machine, install Python 2.x or 3.x and Git. On openSUSE the former is installed by default, while the latter can be added using the sudo zypper in git command. Clone then the projects repository using the git clone git@github.com:dmpop/wimb.git command, switch to the wimb directory, and run the ./wimb.py command. You can then access the app by pointing the browser to 127.0.0.1:8888

You can run also WIMB on Android, but you need to install the Termux app first.

Yes, WIMB runs on Android. But you need Termux for that.

Run then the following commands to upgrade Termux and install the required packages:

pkg update
pkg upgrade
pkg install python git

Launch then Termux, clone then the project’s Git repository, and run WIMB as described above.

In a similar manner, you can run WIMB on a web server. Keep in mind, though, that the app doesn’t have any form of access control or password protection, so you probably wouldn’t want to deploy it on a public server.