Small Metric keeps notes on sorting field photographs. The work is plain: name a folder, tag a frame, move it where it belongs. No flourish, no dashboard. Just a small set of tools that do one thing and leave a trace of what happened. These notes describe the tools, the room they are built in, and the way they are kept working.
What Tools Are For
A field photograph arrives without order. It needs a name, a place, a note on light or weather. The tools here do that sorting: rename, tag, move, log. They do not edit or judge a picture. They only make it findable again, months later, without guessing.
From Paper To Script
Every tool starts as a paragraph on paper. The paragraph says what goes in and what comes out, nothing about how. Only after the paragraph holds still does it become a script. If the paragraph cannot be written plainly, the script is not started yet.
The Room And Desk
The desk is bare except for a lamp and a stack of paper. No decoration, no charts on the wall. The room holds one machine, kept offline most of the day. Quiet is treated as a working condition, not an atmosphere. Nothing here is meant to be looked at twice.
Files, Scripts, A Log
Each tool keeps three things near it: the files it touches, the script itself, and a log of what ran and when it ran. The log is plain text, nothing clever. It is read more often than the script. It answers the question: what actually happened here.
Kept Working, Slowly
Tools are not rewritten often. When one breaks, the fix is small and written down beside the original note. Nothing is upgraded for its own sake. A tool earns its place by still running, unattended, long after the paragraph that started it was written.
Working notes
Method.The first version is the plainest thing that could work, and it usually stays. Each job is timed by hand before a tool is written for it, to see whether it is worth one. Two tools that do nearly the same thing are merged before either one grows. Nothing is written until the whole job fits on one sheet, including what can go wrong.
Pieces.The parts are plain: text files, short scripts and a log that is read every morning. A tool is a few files and a page of notes, and it is copied whole when it moves. Nothing depends on a service that could vanish; everything runs on the desk itself. Old versions are kept in a folder of their own, so nothing has to be remembered.
Bench.The room is small and quiet, shelves of folders on one wall and nothing on the other. A second machine under the bench does the slow jobs overnight. The kettle is nearer than the printer, which says how often each is used. Paper notes go on a board above the desk and come down when the job is done.