If I would approach something like this with all the media on disk and only needs to be accessed locally, I would write a simple OSC database server with something like Python. Basically, have a script that crawls through all the folders and fills an SQLlite dB which the server then reads from and have some basic queries via OSC. Pd could then say "I want an image" and the server would respond with an OSC message containing the fullpath as a string and perhaps any additional metadata which might be useful. The type and amount of metadata depends on how much pre-processing and/or manual tagging you want to do.

That would be a relatively quick & dirty solution. I'm sure there are more robust and generalized media servers out there, but for some things making a streamlined & focused solution is useful.

On Sep 9, 2021, at 12:00 PM, pd-list-request@lists.iem.at wrote:

Message: 2
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2021 10:00:24 +0200
From: rolfm@dds.nl
To: Pd list <pd-list@lists.iem.at>
Subject: [PD] playing random media (bit OT)
Message-ID: <13343ae5530cdee19236aec18082b54e@dds.nl>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

hi, 

in memory of a great friend i lost 

i'm looking for a way to play  at random from his huge archive 

of mixed media (movies, pictures, sound). 

preferably with Puredata. 

to build it from scratch is at this moment too big for me. 

it would be very much appreciated when somebody can point me 

to something that goes in the direction of this goal. 

rolf

--------
Dan Wilcox
@danomatika
danomatika.com
robotcowboy.com