KPhotoAlbum
Yet another weekend working hard on KPhotoAlbum to get us closer to a release. Please everyone hold back anything but important bugs, so I can get the next version out of the door soon, plleeeeeeaaaase.
This snapshot is only bugfixes compared to the last one, except one new feature that Christoph Moseler managed to talk me into including. This features adds the possibilities to see categories in the thumbnail viewer. Also it is now also possible to assign tokens in the category viewer.
This weekend was a blast! I got really a lot of KPhotoAlbum work done. Two major things to report for this snapshot: 1) I now consider the video support done (I tried it with MPlayer, Kaffein, and Kaboodle). 2) I reworked the patch from a long time ago for pixel by pixel viewing, and that has the awesome effect that loading the first image is now much faster (technically, I now load it in view size (say 1024x768) rather than in full size, and only load the full size once needed)
Time flies doesn't it? I've started on some business classes, which drains me for a lot of time, so progress has slowed down a lot. Never the less I managed to get a few bugs fixed, so here a new snapshot is now available.
The votes have been counted, and KPhotoAlbum now has a new splash screen. Congratulation to the winner Jaroslav Holaň.
As you might have been able to tell, I've returned back home from my one year hotel stay, and besides spending more time with my girlfriend, I've started studying in the evening two nights a week. This has taking time away from KPA work, but I'm still slowly advancing towards the next release.
Today I got a few hours of work done on KPA in the morning before my girlfriend got out of bed, so I guess it is time for a new snapshot.
See Second round of votes for details on how to vote.
The Splash screen contest is over, now it is time to vote. See
http://www.kphotoalbum.org/splashscreen.htm for details on the voting. Your
first round vote needs to be in by Wednesday Sep. 20th 18.00 CET.
A new snapshot has just been released, which has one major improvement, namely that the annotation dialog now uses list boxes with check boxes for each item. This has two advantages (1) the intention is clearer to new comers (2) We don't need explicit "Merge" and "Remove" actions from multi image annotations.
I hate people questioning the usability of KPhotoAlbum. But that is nothing compared to how much I hate when they are right :-)
This weekend I've been working on implementing sub category reordering using drag and drop in the annotation dialog. So if you want to tell KPhotoAlbum that Las Vegas is in USA, just grab it with your mouse, and drop it on USA.
As a side effect of this, the items in the list boxes have now changed to check boxes, and an item is marked as on an image when checked (in contrast to, when selected), I hope this will make KPhotoAlbum just a little bit more accessible for newcomers.
The splash screen contest started yesterday just got more exciting. You
now have the chance of winning $100. see contest info
Tonight I called for a contest to create a new splash screen for KPhotoAlbum. See the incoming suggestions or mail me your suggestion.
You have until Sep 15 midnight to send me a suggestion, and after that the KPhotoAlbum community will vote on which one will be in the next release.
Please leave some space for the version number an the status messages in your image, these are added dynamically during the start of KPhotoAlbum.
Today I fixed two crashes in KPhotoAlbum, one which occurred when scrolling in the thumbnail viewer. The other occurred when clicking on the date bar with the middle or right mouse button.
In addition two smaller issues has been addressed. First it is now possible to bind keys to rotate the image in the annotation dialog. Second, clicking on an image in the thumbnail viewer will no longer start a new viewer, but reuse the old one.
Finally, a new splash screen has been added. This is the beginning of a contest to create a splash screen for KPhotoAlbum.
OK, we are slowly approaching the next release (well I expect 2-3 month till the actually release, but this also includes all sort of freezes). So it is time to get started creating snapshots for you all to try.
And there are many good reasons to try out this snapshot, but most important is of course to get rid of bugs, so you don't have to be bothered the next year with an annoying bug similar to the selection bugs in the thumbnail view that must have annoyed you like hell.
In this snapshot you will find these new features and bug fixes compared to the 2.2 release:
A few weeks ago I was considering throwing the icon view used in the browser out, but by accident I tried it with a larger icon size, and found that to be really useful. So now it is possible (in SVN) to configure the icon size, to e.g. look like this:
If you want to see what I'm up to, how KPhotoAlbum development is coming along, why not have a look at my Blog.
Tuomas Suutari is working on a Google Summer Of Code for adding an SQL backend to KPhotoAlbum, and I asked him to provide all of us with a progress report, so here it is.
I just merged changes from my developing branch to actual KPhotoAlbum source code tree (i.e. trunk). This means that now there is already some kind of alpha version of the SQL back-end in KPhotoAlbum.
Currently it's capable of storing almost all the information that the XML back-end does. Only member maps are not yet saved. But code for that is almost ready.
Next stage is to get error handling work, so when connection to database server fails, back-end does something more reasonable than just crashes. And also optimize few database calls to be more SQL friendly. (This is because currently many parts in the code assume that database is in fast memory, which leads to quite different approach than with SQL storage.) Then some kind of configuration dialog has to be done, so user can type username and password to server somewhere.
So there is still some work to do, but things seem promising. Though still some more testing of the back-end has to be done after the SoC project, but you'll get the SQL support eventually.
KPhotoAlbum's news section can now be monitored through your favorite RSS reader, simply point it to http://www.kphotoalbum.org, or http://www.kphotoalbum.org/news.rss in case it don't understand the first.
Yesterday the google summer of code projects was chosen, and I'm happy to announce that Tuomas Suutari (thsuut AT utu DOT fi) was elected to work on KPhotoAlbum. Here is his description of the project:
As you maybe already know, currently KPhotoAlbum stores its data in an XML file. This file is read into memory on start up, and is written to disk when saving.
Jesper suggested on the KPhotoAlbum mailing list that someone would add support for SQL database back-end as a Google Summer of Code project. He has already made a proof of concept implementation for making the back end pluggable.
When I got that mail, I immediately realized that this would be a cool project for me, because I use KPhotoAlbum regularly and love programming.
Adding possibility to save image database into SQL database could provide at least following improvements:
- scale better for large photo collections (uses less memory)
- make KPhotoAlbum start and close faster (no loading/saving of the XML file)
- add possibility to access the database by multiple users at the same time
The last bullet is really the biggest improvement to many users, who might want multiple people to tag the set of images at the same time, and perhaps allow for adding information from say a web interface.
Finally I got KPhotoAlbum 2.2 out of the door (actually it is already a couple a weeks ago now - yeah I've been busy). The new version contains two major improvements: (1) Much improved support for EXIF, including capability to search your images based on EXIF info. (2) A much improved thumbnail viewer which allows you to resize the thumbnails to any size simply by dragging with the middle mouse button.
The following is a list of features added since 2.1:
The following is a list of important bug fixes since 2.1:
Finally, since the previous KPhotoAlbum release (back in the days when it was called KimDaBa), I've worked very hard on trying to add an SQL backend. This required rather a lot of restructuring of KPhotoAlbum. Unfortunately I had to give up on the task before it was finished, as it simply ate me up from the inside. The good news is that all the changes is still in there, and it seems like we might get a Google Summer of Code project for making the darn thing work.
It has been a very long time ago since the last release, and a lot of good things are in there now. So now is now, I've started release procedure as of today, expect a release within the next two month.
KPhotoAlbum just entered message freeze today, and is planned to be released on Monday April 10th.
The domain www.kphotoalbum.org now points to this site.
Over the years I've learned that the casual user doesn't think he needs an image database (which was what KimDaBa meant). So hopefully a rename to KPhotoAlbum will help the user see the need for the application. Funny enough, KPhotoAlbum was my very very very first name for the application way before it went public.
Over the Christmas holidays I got utterly annoyed by the thumbnail viewer - well it has been a pain in the back for a long time, because it had bugs I was unable to solve despite days of investigation, and because it did not allow me to configure the look and feel very well. Therefore I rewrote it from scratch.
The result is a much better looking thumbnail viewer, and as an added bonus, scrolling is now much faster than with the old one. In addition I stole an idea from Bibble wrt to resizing the thumbnails - now simple press the middle mouse button, and move it to resize the thumbnails.
Initially I planned to throw away support for reordering images, but public demand made me change my mind. However, KPhotoAlbum will now ask for permission before doing the actual reordering, which hopefully will avoid that people get their images reordered by accident.
Finally, as an added bonus, it was now very simple to implement a request I've heard a few times, namely the possibility to specify if thumbnails show be shown with the newest one first or last. So I implemented that request ;-)
I created a new snapshot which you may find from the side bar, choose Download->snapshots.
With the EXIF support in KPhotoAlbum, it is time to start the series of snapshots, you find the newest from the side bar, choose Download->snapshots.
Thanks to Marco Molteni for helping me get my scripts ready for producing snapshots
OK, I did actually managed to pull this off - It is now possible to search for EXIF.
It's getting late so I'd better soon go to bed. I've been working non stop all weekend on getting KPhotoAlbum to show EXIF information. You can now do that in two different places. Either using the dialog you can see to the right, or in the viewer. From the Settings menu it is possible to specify which exif keywords to use for each of the locations.
Next I'd like to give it a shot of storring all the EXIF keywords for all images in a database (not in the index.xml file as it would explode from that, but rather some SQL database). With the information in a database, I'd like to develop a dialog where you may search for images based on exif information, something like saying "Shutter Speed should be fater than 1/125". Don't get your hopes too high yet, this is all dreaming on my part, afterall I have burnt my fingers once on databases and KPhotoAlbum. But I will give it a shot.
I've been staying with a customer for month now and lives/work in a cubicle landscape - rather different from working from home which I'm used to.
After approx one and a half month I got to talk about digital images with one of my inmates, and I told him about KPhotoAlbum. First, that is rather extraordinary that I manage to work almost two month with a guy without having told him anything about KPhotoAlbum :-) What is much more extraordinary is that he previously worked with Bibble Labs, and is close friends with the owner. Bibble is an image processing application that works on Linux. WHAT ARE THE ODDS?
Well a new camera has been on my wishlist for a long time, but this opportunity was just too great, so I bought myself a new camera, and will try to see how KPhotoAlbum can work together with Bibble.
The camera is a Canon Rebel XT and comes with a EFS 18-55 lense. With it I bought a Canon 50mm f/1.8 II camera lense, and a Canon EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III telephoto zoom lens.
So finally, everyone of you who have hoped for KPhotoAlbum to be better with RAW files, stay tuned, now I've got a camera spitting them out, so it won't take long before KPhotoAlbum does something with them.
It might seem so from the amount of releases made recently, but KPhotoAlbum is indeed not dead. I'm working hard on a lot of restructuring, and I've spent/wasted a lot of time on the SQL backend (which I gave up on, due to lack of SQL knowledge - any takers?)
As a side track of things, I've started making small flash videos showing things in KPhotoAlbum, check them out by pressing Videos in the side bar.
After approximately another half year of development it is time to get a new KPhotoAlbum version out of the door. As with every previous version of KPhotoAlbum it of course contains at least one major new thing, a bunch of minor new features, and a bunch of bug fixes. Read on to learn whats new.
Now that KPhotoAlbum 2.1 is done, development will of course start on a KPhotoAlbum 2.2 with brand new features. Join the mailing list to discuss what you would like to see in the future.
KPhotoAlbum development is now freezing up, and getting ready for a 2.1 release, so please give the snapshot a try.
This is the full list of changes:
I'm afraid I will be very busy at work the next month, so here is a snapshot for you to enjoy meanwhile. Included is speed optimization when scrolling large parts in the thumbnail view, plus the capability to drag out a selection in the date bar.
On the misc page you may find a perl module for manipulating the KPhotoAlbum database from perl.
The snapshot from yesterday could in rare cases result in loss of information in the index.xml file, when sorting the images. Thus a new snapshot has been made.
Make this a warning always to back up your index.xml file, especially when using snapshots.
Integrating the date bar in the application was way easier than I anticipated, so a new snapshot is now available which includes the date bar. The date bar both shows the statistics of your images, but may also be used for navigation, simply click on a date in the date bar, and you will be shown images from that date. This is what it looks like.
So far KPhotoAlbum have had no need for your images to be sorted, but the date bar works by far best if they are (Jumping to a given date will show all images from that date). KPhotoAlbum thus have a new function to aid you in ensuring that all your images have valid dates (which might be something as simple as 1998-2001). Once you have given all your images a valid date, use the sorting function from the Images menu to sort your images.
Previous versions showed the thumb nails of your images in folder of 100 images per folder, but for the date bar to work, all images are now shown in one folder. The previous setup was not by design, but simply because I couldn't figure out how to avoid loading all thumb nails at once. Now, fortunately I found out, so showing 10.000 thumb nails doesn't course your computer to load gigabytes of memory. Let me know if you have a very good reason for re-adding the folder view with each 100 images.
Over the last month I've worked hard on a date bar showing statistics about images, and also helping navigating wrt. dates. I'm pretty done with the date bar itself now, and is now working on integrating it into KPhotoAlbum. This is what it looks like
The first post 2.0 snapshot is now available. This snapshot includes (See The ChangeLog file for full details):
Eight month of coding and waiting are finally over, KPhotoAlbum 2.0 has today been released. The new version contains a lot of improvements and speed optimizations. Below I'll highlight a few of the improvements, the full story can be read from the ChangeLog file.
A WIKI has been created for KPhotoAlbum. Help me develop a FAQ here.
KPhotoAlbum's website has now been upgraded, so it is much nicer, and hopefully
easier to navigate. Thanks to Marc Cramdal (bonolebonobo-ifrance-com)
I'm still searching for someone to run the
daily maintenance, so if that is a job for you, please contact
Jesper.
Design & Code: Jaroslav Holaň | Content: Jesper Kjær Pedersen | XHTML 1.0 Strict | CSS
