The binary installation package is self-explanatory. Download and execute it (download file ending on win32.exe or win64.exe). Tested with Windows 7, 8, 10 (64bit).

For Debian-like systems (tested with Ubuntu) download the respective .DEB files. Install the pre-requisites: sudo apt-get install libqt5multimediawidgets5 libqt5multimedia5-plugins qt5-image-formats-plugins. Now install pivot with sudo dpkg -i pivot-x.y.z.deb. Start the program with pivot.

For RPM-based systems (tested with Fedora 22) install the following pre-requisites: sudo dnf install qt5-qtmultimedia qt5-qtsvg. Now install pivot with rpm --install -p pivot-x.y.z.rpm Start the program with pivot.

Tested with Ubuntu 14.04, 15.04 and Fedora 22-3 (for all with both 32, and 64bit).

You will need cmake and the third-party modules libraw, libexif and Qt5. If, for example you want to build in ubuntu, do: sudo apt-get install qttools5-dev-tools qttools5-dev qtbase5-dev libqt5svg5-dev libqt5opengl5-dev qtmultimedia5-dev libraw-dev libexif-dev cmake . For fedora you would install the following dependencies: sudo dnf install cmake gcc gcc-c++ qt5-qtbase-devel qt5-qttools-devel qt5-qtx11extras-devel qt5-qtmultimedia-devel LibRaw-devel libexif-devel qt5-qtsvg-devel. Now build pivot:

Do keep your original files! Not only for backup reasons (see Section 2, “Preface 2: Do Backups !”) but also for possible future ideas of yours. In future, you may want to...

There are many more reasons, why you want to keep all files, which you might not even think of, yet. You should keep the original files as a copy of your proper gallery structure. Pivot supports you in following this types of structure.

Whenever the camera supports it, always also save a copy of the image in RAW format. Some cameras also support saving a RAW+JPG of a single photograph. Do it even if you don't know what RAW files are, if you use them only occasionally or if you think this is not worth the storage space taken. You may always want to come back to certain photographs for a different (aliasing free) color/brightness adaptation, white balance or other post-processing steps. Even if you don't know about RAW processing just now, you may in the future...

The way, people store and view their images differs a great deal. Usually they know where to find images and remember their rough dates taken. But this structure fails immediately when exchanging images with other people. Even if your collection grows large, you will lose track of your organization. In the next couple of paragraphs, some problems and respective, useful principles will be presented, which may help organizing your photographs a lot better.

Insert the acquisition dates into the filename !!! This cannot be stressed enough. Acquisition dates are usually stored in both, the files' meta data and the files' time stamps. But both WILL, I repeat, they WILL be deleted or changed. This results in losing your organization. Also if you call your folders similar to "Trip to Paris" you will lose control after having a couple of these kinds of folders.

Another point is that many digital cameras import their photographs and videos to a folder named by year, month and possibly day, too (e.g. "2012-05-01"). This is bad, as well - I would bet almost any money that you don't remember what's inside the folders after one or two years.

There are database supported gallery systems. Then the filenames don't really matter. But this is wrong, since you may want to give away your files. The recipients then won't get any idea of your files theme's and acquisition dates. So rename your files before plugging them into databases. pivot is intended to do exactly this, copy, pre-select and rename images before you continue working with these files.

In Section 4.1.1, “Keep all files” you were strongly suggested to keep a second, complete copy of all files in a different structure. This, however, introduces the problem of having two possibly equally named files of one photograph. This may happen, for instance, in database systems, which read all files and let the user do some sorting, processing, etc. You are probably not able to distinguish beween the original file and the one ready for processing. On the one hand, don't let your database scan your orginal files anyways, but on the other hand, preceed the original files with an "O_", just to be sure.

To conclude the above points: Create a structure where you include the acquisition dates and a short description in both, the possible folders and the actual file names. Go from biggest to the smallest date. So always start with the year, followed by the month, the day and finally the description (e.g. " 2012/2012-05-01 Trip to Paris 01.jpg"). This way, even if you lose time stamps etc, you can still properly sort the files with respect to the time by using names. Use pivot for this task, this will save you a great deal of time and stress.

The above paragraphs presented a couple of problems which may occur when working with un-organized photograph and video files. Now, a good folder structure may look like this (this has also been suggested similarly from other authors, www.henner.info for instance):

        ├── My Pictures
        │   ├── 2011
        │   │   └── 2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday
        │   │       ├── 2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday 01.jpg
        │   │       ├── 2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday 02.jpg
        │   │       ├── 2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday 03.jpg
        │   │       └── 2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday 04.jpg
        │   └── 2012
        │       ├── 2012-05-02 Trip to Paris
        │       │   ├── 2012-05-02 Trip to Paris 01.jpg
        │       │   ├── 2012-05-02 Trip to Paris 02.avi
        │       │   └── 2012-05-02 Trip to Paris 03.jpg
        │       └── 2012-07-05 Trip To Spain
        │           ├── 2012-07-05 Trip To Spain 01.jpg
        │           ├── 2012-07-07 Trip To Spain 02.jpg
        │           ├── 2012-07-07 Trip To Spain 03.jpg
        │           └── 2012-07-09 Trip To Spain 04.jpg
        └── Original Pictures
            ├── O_2011
            │   └── O_2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday
            │       ├── O_2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday 01.jpg
            │       ├── O_2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday 01.RAW
            │       ├── O_2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday 02.jpg
            │       ├── O_2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday 02.RAW
            │       ├── O_2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday 03.jpg
            │       ├── O_2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday 03.RAW
            │       ├── O_2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday 04.jpg
            │       ├── O_2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday 04.RAW
            │       ├── O_2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday 05.jpg
            │       ├── O_2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday 05.RAW
            │       ├── O_2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday 06.jpg
            │       └── O_2011-03-27 Emmy's Birthday 06.RAW
            └── O_2012
                ├── O_2012-05-02 Trip to Paris
                │   ├── O_2012-05-02 Trip to Paris 01.jpg
                │   ├── O_2012-05-02 Trip to Paris 02.avi
                │   └── O_2012-05-02 Trip to Paris 03.jpg
                └── O_2012-07-05 Trip To Spain
                    ├── O_2012-07-05 Trip To Spain 01.jpg
                    ├── O_2012-07-07 Trip To Spain 02.jpg
                    ├── O_2012-07-07 Trip To Spain 03.jpg
                    └── O_2012-07-09 Trip To Spain 04.jpg
        

Observe the following aspects of this structure:

Now, click on "Review dates, times and albums". This switches to the tab with a list of all of the files. Here you can edit all files directly. You can change the file times, change the assigned albums, enter comments (if comments have been enabled, see settings), etc.

In the settings of pivot, you can enter a different number of copying destinations (e.g. all files go to a backup folder and a smaller subset go to the actual galleries folder). You can enable and or disable files for particular destinations by using the file overview list (see Section 5.2.1, “Review of files with file list”). But it might be easier or more handy by actually viewing these images. So start the image viewer by clicking on "View files and select for target". An image viewer will pop up. Apart from some standard control elements, you can group corresponding raw and jpg images (will only load and display the jpg image). Most importantly, you can select each file for different destinations by pressing the respective number key, see Figure 3, “pivot image viewer”. The destination number will appear or disappear on pressing the keys, indicating the copying status for the respective destination (1). In full screen mode, this will be indicated in the upper left corner.

Figure 3. pivot image viewer

In many cases, different cameras have different date and time settings. Sometimes this is just OK, sometimes the temporal order of merged files is just wrong. Pivot provides a tool to selectively adapt the times of two different folders (i.e. folders with files from different cameras). The only thing what you need is either an image pair roughly at the same time or you simply know the camera time difference.

In the advanced assistant view, click on "Adapt times from different cameras". Then you are presented a table with two columns, see Figure 4, “pivot Adapt Times”. First of all, click on the reference folder and a folder to be adapted, from the two drop down boxes (1) and (2). In the first column of the table, you see the reference image folder. In the second column, you can see the folder to be adapted. The overall order of both columns (potentially alternating, as you may have noticed) is determined based on the file's creation dates and the current time difference. You can manually enter the time difference. However, it might be easier to select a pair of files in the first and second column and click the anchor(3) icon (first column selection) followed by one of the time icons(4) (for the second column selection). The program determines the difference and updates the order.

Figure 4. pivot Adapt Times

With this option, you can create new subdirectories in the destination folders. This, for instance, is useful for a backup destination, when you want to keep files from different photographers in different folders. It may help ensuring ownership, even if images get mixed up in the final gallery.

You'll need to do two things. Click on " different directories for different photographers". Create a mapping there (source -> destination sub folder). Enable the respective tag in the settings.