History of Pornspective
As an avid porn fan and a collector of movies and scenes of some of the hottest porn stars on the planet, my collection has just grown and grown. Given the amount of digital porn media now available, it’s easy to see how collectors can amass huge collections. However with huge collections, organising, browsing and searching becomes significantly more difficult. Those gems you downloaded years ago just get lost amongst the forever growing content.
Porn is one hobby, software development is another. With over twenty years experience of developing software, this was a challenge I knew I would enjoy solving!
The Concept: What problem am I trying to solve?
Windows Explorer or similar file explorers are great for most things, and even for my collection they did a reasonably good job. However they’re slow and constrain you to having to put content in a single location, but content has many perspectives and shouldn’t be constrained like this.
I wanted a tool that would use existing file systems and file naming conventions so collections like my own can be easily scanned and organised. The tool would assist with file naming and indexing whilst at the same time introduce the ability to tag content. This tagging feature would be the heart of the system, allowing content to be sorted, grouped and search. Most importantly it would remove the constraints of a classic folder system. Effectively content could appear in multiple folders with tagging. Finally I wanted tags to have a level of intelligence, such as inheritance which would become a powerful feature when organising collections.
The tool also had to be resilient to filename changes or moving files to different locations, it needed to detect changes like these without losing the content.
Finally, searching needed to be instantaneous. I grew tired of using Windows Explorer to search my thousands of files, it was painful. The ultimate goal here was to organise and index a collection which would allow the browsing of content to be a better experience.
With these basic requirements in place, I could then go on and build much more in the way of functionality!
The Development: Pornspective is born.
With the basic requirements at hand, I began to develop two engines. An index engine that would scan my files, extract names, keywords and tags and process these into a second engine specifically designed to enable ultra fast filtering, sorting and searching. This is the heart of Pornspective.
Users would need to specify Index Locations, these are folders on a computer or network that they wish to scan and index. There can be any number of Index Locations, in fact it is recommended that Index Locations should represent smaller areas of your system, such as one per actress or studio.
With Index Locations set, the engines would then trawl through the content and extract titles, tags and thumbnails which represent the content. This might take some time to index but it really should be as easy as that!
First User Interface: Pornspective v1
For speed, I used an older technology to create the user interface for Pornspective v1. I wanted to focus on getting the heart of the application right with the engines before making it pretty! That said, I think the UI in v1 is very attractive compared to many applications but I always knew my artistic vision was limited here and always had grander ideas for a user interface.
However using this UI tech allowed me to get more functionality out quick. Over a period of twelve months I introduced admin screens, thumbnail editors, bookmarks, internal video player, plugins to scrape content for online and of course multiple ways in which the content browsers can show search results.
Towards the end of v1 I introduced a technology called WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) which meant much more could be done with user interface controls and its overall look. Now I was happy with the engine it was time to think about a brand new user interface using WPF and creating the vision I always had.
The Game Changer: Pornspective AI
I wasn’t quite ready to begin work on v2, frankly I knew it was going to be a big piece of work that would take some time. I felt that tagging was still something that could be automated more and with the emergence of AI and machine learning in recent years, technology like this was something I could harness.
If I could have an automatic way of scanning content and suggesting tags, well that would be a Game Changer in my opinion. So I set out researching computer vision AI and developed a good understanding of the technology and most importantly how I could use it. As this really was cutting edge technology, especially brining it into a Microsoft platform was relatively new, I had to work a lot out for myself. Through some hard work and effort though I managed to pull together a AI engine that worked. In fact it worked way beyond my expectations.
For Pornspective AI, it wasn’t just implementing code and working out how to do it. I had to also train a computer vision model, you can’t just download a model that recognises acts in a porn scene! As part of this I ended up building a couple of helper applications which fine tuned the model data. 10,000 images were provided to the model learning and the result was an AI model that really was a Game Changer!
I wrapped this up into a single application called Pornspective AI. Why? Well scanning collections and applying AI would be a busy task so I didn’t want Pornspective v1 to be burdened with this task, furthermore by making it a separate application meant users can choose to run the AI on a different machine dedicated to do this.
So Pornspective AI was born. A system which extracts video thumbnails and then using computer vision identifies porn related content such as actions, appearance and objects in the scene. How do the two applications join? Two options, firstly Pornspective AI can export a results file which can be imported into Pornspective v1 and v2, or secondly the two applications can remote communicate (handshake) with each other when configured to do so. With this option Pornspective v1 or v2 can initiate a scan of content and will await for AI to return the results.
Worshiping the beauty of Porn : Introducing Pornspective v2
As I said, I always felt limited with v1 on what I could do with the user-interface. I embarked on building the front-end of v2 from scratch using WPF. Importantly I kept the engines and everything that made Pornspective v1 did behind the scenes – there really was no need to change that! WPF does take longer to develop, but the advantage is you can easily create custom controls that are suited to what the user needed.
Pornspective v2 introduces a brand new internal video player, with a much slicker set of video controls and embedded bookmarks and timed tags. Furthermore I have been able to extend the feature by including playlists and allowing the users to create compilations of their favourite content. Tagging has it’s own controls too, a much better user experience in my option than a drop down box.
With second attempts you can also refactor some ideas on how to streamline your user interface development. Here I did just that, all admin controls now go through a generic control set meaning any additional admin screens I now want to create are simple and quick to implement.
Pornspective v2 is really the vision I had from the beginning and I’m really pleased with how it looks and that I’ve finally managed to get pretty much all of the original v1 functionality added.
Final note : Plugins, Pornspective SDK and most importantly … Enjoy!
I’m a huge fan of plugin architecture (sometimes called add-ons) and have used this in Pornspective. I was inspired by systems like Kodi where the ability to write plugins has given Kodi so many uses and of course meant endless flexibility. I want the same for Pornspective. To date, plugins to scrape content, collect actress metadata, download content and even the AI engine model are all plugin based. I’m hoping to release an SDK for those that are happy to help develop plugins. So far, its been only me developing everything you see in Pornspective, however I’d like to open it up more from now on.
For now though, I hope you give Pornspective a go and enjoy!
How do I get Pornspective?
If you’d like to support the development of Pornspective and become a subscriber then head over to patreon.com/pornspective and receive a personal license key. If you subscribe for 12 months or more then you’ll receive a lifetime key!