To manage a large collection of screenshots and storing them efficiently in a timeline

Question

I have a huge collection of screenshots that I keep taking over the time. They have been taken while:

1. Browsing webpages like Wiki's / Registration links / Profiles
2. Playing Games
3. Reading Texts in PDF's, editors, etc.
4. Writing code
5. Watching videos
6. Facing glitches in particular software

These screenshots keep increasing and consuming disk space on my laptop. I also don't want to delete them, because sometimes the are useful to me (like I could go back and search from them, since they are named based on time-stamps). As they increase over time, I keep compressing them into tar balls (I use Linux).

The problem I face is when I wish to search among really old screenshots, I sometime forget when I took it. So, I can't decompress all the tar balls to find that screenshot and so eventually, I leave it as it is.

What I'm actually looking for:

1. A library / tool, to add metadata to an image / extract information.
2. A tool to make a timeline out of my screenshot, for easy, thumbnail based scrolling, in case, I can't remember the context.
3. Algorithms/tools that somehow categorize an image.
4. Compression algorithms / tools that reduce the size of an image, but the resolution isn't affected a lot.
5. A DataBase that stores images in an optimal way.

Something that runs on GNU/Linux is preferred.

The following features aren't a primary concern, but good to have.

• Something like http://getgreenshot.org/ -> Screenshot edit and export tool
• Power Screenshot Manager (To modify the current screenshots)
• Screenshot uploaders (to sites like Picasa.. )

Answer 1

For your screnshot collection I would recommend digiKam. Features:

1. It runs on Linux
2. Has timeline view.
3. Reads/edits image metadata
4. Allows tagging images

A nice screenshot tool is Shutter. Here are its key features:

You can take a screenshot of a specific area, window, your whole screen, or even of a website – apply different effects to it, draw on it to highlight points, and then upload to an image hosting site, all within one window.

From http://shutter-project.org/

It can upload to Dropbox, Imgur and other image hosting sites.