Archive for January 9th, 2009
Cataloguing my home library
I have many books at home, and I’ve always wanted to keep a catalogue of my books. But because I have so many books, manually typing in ISBNs was out of the question. I wanted a tech solution, preferably free. I explored the possibility of software to recognise barcodes from photos, since it would be easy to snap photos of barcodes of my books.
Being a Windows person, I searched for and tried Windows programs first. The only candidate I found was bcTester. It recognised the first photo, then choked on the second. I tried cropping that, and it recognised it, but then choked on the third. To make it easier, I adjusted my photos to increase the contrast (easily done in batch), but cropping each photo individually would defeat the whole purpose of my “exercise”, and bcTester did not support batch processing either, so I decided to pass.
The next program I tried was Zebra, a *nix open-source project. I spent some time getting the pre-requisites installed, including messing around with some symbolic links, before I managed to successfully compile and run zebraimg. Once I did, zebraimg was just amazing. It zipped through my barcode images and got most correct.
