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Summer vacation means much faster thumbnail viewer.
(16 Aug 2010 09:00:00 +0100 )

I've just returned from one week of vacation on Zakynthos in Greece, and the result is the same as every year of summer vacation - a lot of time to spent on KPhotoAlbum :-)

This year I rewrote the thumbnail viewer from the old Q3IconView to Qt4's QListView, and while I was at it (and yes that was really my starting point), I optimized the loading of thumbnails quite a bit. We are talking about orders of magnitude here!

The technical details - in case you care

Just prior to my vacation I experienced with storing thumbnails in one large file, which is much faster to load than storing each thumbail in a file of their own. See the details in my blog

This is what I do now, but that really only contribute to a minor part of the speed up, it turned out that thumbnails was scaled when loaded from the cache - at the time that seemed like a good idea, but the result was that each thumbnail costed an extra 10 msec - which amounts to a whole second for 100 thumbnails. Now the images in the cache has the actual size needed. This means that it is flushed each time you resize the thumbnail - so stop doing that a lot :-)

Another slowdown was the drawing of the 3D effect around each thumbnail. By changing that from drawing 5 rectangles to drawing 5 filled rectangles, I got a huge speedup :-)

What are the catch?

So is this all great, no catch?, well there is a few minor ones.

  • We are storing the thumbnails in our own format now, so other application wont be able to reused them - anyway, that has been so for a few years already, so no big deal.
  • Thumbnails needs to be recreated when thumbnail size is changed. This was the price we had to pay for this, as the alternative, which we used before, was to store the images in say 256x256, and then scale them down, but that was exactly what costed a lot.
  • When you resize the thumbnails, new thumbnails are generated for all the videos too. As the thumbnail for the videos are a random screenshot from the video, this means that it will change each time, which might make it harder to recognize them.
  • The old selection model of the thumbnail viewer has been replaced with QListView's version. This means you do rectangle selections with the mouse. I might rework that to use our own selection method again later on, if there is a public demand for it.
  • I'm sure I've introduced a lot of new bugs :-)

What are the advantages?

  • Much much faster - we are talking about smoooth scrolling now, something like going over say 5-10 pages of thumbnails per second, where the old implementation took perhaps 1-2 second per page.
  • The code has been rewritten to use Qt 4's QListView, which means a lot of code had been cleaned up - to the end user this means fewer lines for us developers to add bugs to :-)

KPhotoAlbum 4.1.1 released
(15 Nov 2009 22:00:00 +0100 )

KPhotoAlbum 4.1.1 has been released with one important bugfix, namely a fix for images getting rotated with random angles. If you have any images with such rotations, please do ask for help on the mailing list.

KPhotoAlbum 4.1 released
(25 Oct 2009 14:00:00 +0100 )

KPhotoAlbum is now a reality with many improvements and bugfixes over the 4.0.x series. Special thanks goes to Hassan Ibraheem and Miika Turkia who have made a large contribution to this version, and also to Wes Hardaker, Franck Sicard, Matthias Fussel, Thomas Pircher, and Bart Visscher who all have contributed with patches.

Try it out

New Features and major improvements since 4.0

  • Reworked the browser completely
  • Reworked the thumbnail view so it no looks much better
  • When AnnotationDialog is called with multiple images, show selected only shows also partially selected items. Thanks to Hassan Ibraheem for patch.
  • Added support for a copyright tag on the HTML generated pages (Thanks to Miika Turkia for a patch for this)
  • Added new theme for HTML pages which includes improved support using java script. (Thanks to Miika Turkia for a patch for this)
  • Speed up browsing of categories with many sub categories. This took browsing from the order of magnitude of half minutes to a second.
  • Made it much more explicit when done tagging images (Now there is a show untagged images category)
  • Added support for searching by rating.
  • Now it is possible to add a category image from a context menu, which makes that process much faster (this fixes bug #195023). Thanks to Thomas Pircher for the work on that.
  • Now it is possible to chose the thumbnail storage format from the settings dialog (ppm files which we used by default are pretty large, so on limited disk space you may wish to choose jpg instead to trade some speed for disk space. (thanks to Franck Sicard for a patch for this)
  • Add a keybinding for delete in the viewer that will take the image of the display list. This is useful when comparing a number of images and want to take the worst one away every time to find the best one. Thanks to Wes Hardaker for a patch implementing this.

Bugfixes since 4.0

  • Invoke external application for multiple files did not work. Thanks to Miika Turkia for a patch for this.
  • The HTML generator did not display the available themes correctly. Thanks to Miika Turkia for a patch for this.
  • Changed default shortcut for copy from previous image in the annotation dialog to Alt+insert, as control+insert was eaten by the line edits, and the shortcut did thus not work when they had the keyboard focus.
  • fixed bug #192385 - it was not possible to hide items in the annotation between sessions.
  • fixed bug #186807 - no cancel button in "create own database dialog"
  • New images was not correctly inserted into the exif database (thanks to Bart Visscher for a patch that fixes this.) Please rerun "Maintainance->Recreate Exif Search Database" to ensure your database it working again.
  • Somehow the XML database can get a file loaded twice. As a remedy until we find the real bug, we will ignore the new files when they are loaded from the database. Thanks to Franck Sicard for a patch for this
  • fixed bug #186708 - Tokens can not be access from the annotation dialog
  • The remove token dialog was broken second time it was brought up.
  • fixed bug #167045: add ENTER as search dialog tag auto completion key. Thanks to Hassan Ibraheem for the patch for this.
  • fixed bug #165742: ListSelect blanks out when typing an initial letter that does not match. Thanks to Hassan Ibraheem for the patch for this.
  • fixed issue #196095 - Add icon for hide non selected. Thanks to Hassan Ibraheem for patch.
  • fixed bug #171517: Repopulate categories lists whenever an image is loaded. Thanks to Hassan Ibraheem for patch.
  • fixed bug #197107: Generated HTML pages have empty theme name and theme author.
  • Added support for rating multiple images at once in the annotation dialog.
  • Improved focus handling in the annotation dialog
  • Resizing the category overview page now is done without the actual thumbnails, that makes it much faster and much more smooth
  • Fixed bug #150971 - disable too low zoom levels, thanks to alexjironkin@gmail.com
  • Fixed bug #199629 - new images don't trigger dirty state, thanks to mat.fuessel@gmx.net
  • fixed bug #201116: kphotoalbum crashes when trying to remove image without deleting from disk
  • To move items around in the thumbnail viewer, you now first have to select them, then move them. This makes it so much easier to select items, as you do not have to find an empty space to start.
  • Show the file list directly in the Read Exif Info dialog. Previously it was a secondary dialog, with a do-not-show-again checkbox and a cancel button (none of those two made any sense there)

KPhotoAlbum 4.0.2 released
(29 July 2009 23:10:00 +0200 )

A patch release of KPhotoAlbum 4.0 has been released, and it includes these fixes:

  • fixed bug #201116: kphotoalbum crashes when trying to remove image without deleting from disk
  • Exif database insertion works again. Thanks to Matthias Fussel
  • fixed bug #197107: Generated HTML pages have empty theme name and theme author.
  • When AnnotationDialog is called with multiple images, show selected only shows also partially selected items. Thanks to Hassan Ibraheem for patch.
  • fixed bug #165742: ListSelect blanks out when typing an initial letter that does not match. Thanks to Hassan Ibraheem for the patch for this.
  • fixed bug #167045: add ENTER as search dialog tag auto completion key. Thanks to Hassan Ibraheem for the patch for this.
  • bug fix: The remove token dialog was broken second time it was brought up.
  • fixed bug #186708 - Tokens can not be access from the annotation dialog
  • Somehow the XML database can get a file loaded twice. As a remedy until we find the real bug, we will ignore the new files when they are loaded from the database. Thanks to Franck Sicard for a patch for this
  • New images was not correctly inserted into the exif database (thanks to Bart Visscher for a patch that fixes this.) Please rerun "Maintainance->Recreate Exif Search Database" to ensure your database it working again.

Try it out

New snapshot with improved Thumbnail Viewer, Exif Database working, and more
(21 July 2009 21:46:00 +0200 )

A new snapshot has been created, the highlights are:

  • Add a keybinding for delete in the viewer that will take the image of the display list. This is useful when comparing a number of images and want to take the worst one away every time to find the best one. Thanks to Wes Hardaker for a patch implementing this.
  • Now it is possible to chose the thumbnail storage format from the settings dialog (ppm files which we used by default are pretty large, so on limited disk space you may wish to choose jpg instead to trade some speed for disk space. (thanks to Franck Sicard for a patch for this)
  • To move items around in the thumbnail viewer, you now first have to select them, then move them. This makes it so much easier to select items, as you do not have to find an empty space to start.
  • new (non round) look of the thumbnail viweer
  • Refactored the code of the thumbnail viewer, so it now is much more clean and understandable.
  • Exif database insertion works again. Thanks to Matthias Fussel
  • Fixed bug #199629 - new images don't trigger dirty state, thanks Matthias Fussel
  • Fixed bug #150971 - disable too low zoom levels, thanks to alexjironkin AT gmail.com

Try it out

New snapshot
(11 July 2009 17:40:00 +0200 )

A new snapshot has been created, the highlights are:

  • Now it is possible to add a category image from a context menu, which makes that process much faster (this fixes bug #195023). Thanks to Thomas Pircher for the work on that.
  • Resizing the category overview page now is done without the actual thumbnails, that makes it much faster and much more smooth
  • Improved focus handling in the annotation dialog
  • Made the icons in the thumbnail viewer nicer (round and with a 3D effect)
  • Added support for searching by rating.
  • Much improved HTML export by Miika Turkia
  • Added support for rating multiple images at once in the annotation dialog.

Try it out

New snapshot
(30 June 2009 11:00:00 +0200 )

A new snapshot has been created, the highlights are:

  • Made it much more explicit when done tagging images:
    • An item for showing images not yet tagged are available in the browser
    • A configuration option is available for specifying which category and tag should be used to specify untagged images.
    • This tag is set on images when loaded in
    • This tag is removed when selecting "done tagging" in the annotation dialog. It is also possible to select "continue later" in that dialog
    • Speed up browsing of categories with many sub categories. This took browsing from the order of magnitude of half minutes to a second.
    • Added new theme for HTML pages which includes improved support using java script. (Thanks to Miika Turkia for a patch for this)
    • Added support for a copyright tag on the HTML generated pages (Thanks to Miika Turkia for a patch for this)
    • A number of bugfixes.

    Try it out

New web pages
(25 June 2009 17:35:00 +0200 )

It is not everything that is visible to the eye! One of those things is the new revision of the KPhotoAlbum website. Every change this time has happen behind the screen, where Martin Jaburek have rewritten it all to now use PHP. Previously the sidebar was duplicated in each an every web page - trust me that was no fun to maintain.

New snapshot with improved Browser
(13 June 2009 18:35:00 +0200 )

A new snapshot has been made today, which includes a brand new browser, see details and download from the snapshot page.

new browser

New section on getting involved on KPhotoAlbum website
(12 June 2009 20:55:00 +0200 )

A brand new section has been added to the KPhotoAlbum web site helping people getting involved. Give it a try

Among other things, a number of junior tasks have been identified - that is tasks, that will help you get started with the code without loosing too much hair.

This weekend Jesper (as the last 3-4 weekends) will be working on KPhotoAlbum all day, so join him on the IRC channel, to get started with your contribution.

Tuomas is getting married today!
(6 June 2009 10:30:00 +0200 )

Today, our KPhotoAlbum developer Tuomas, will hopefully remember how to say YES! in Finnish, to his wife to be.

All the best to Tuomas and his soon-to-be-wife from the KPhotoAlbum community!

KPhotoAlbum 4.0.1 released
(21 May 2009 19:00:00 +0200 )

A new bugfix release have been made of KPhotoAlbum. Changes since the 4.0 release are:

  • The handbook are now included in the package
  • Fix compilation with new Marble and armel (Marble changed API again)
  • fixed bug #186807 - no cancel button in "create own database dialog
  • fixed bug #192385 - it was not possible to hide items in the annotation between sessions.
  • Changed default shortcut for copy from previous image in the annotation dialog to Alt+insert, as control+insert was eaten by the line edits, and the shortcut did thus not work when they had the keyboard focus.
  • BUGFIX: The HTML generator did not display the available themes correctly. Thanks to theBro@luukku.com for a patch for this.
  • BUGFIX: Invoke external application for multiple files did not work. Thanks to theBro@luukku.com for a patch for this.

Competition: Make the coolest KPhotoAlbum demo video and win $100
(12 May 2009 10:00:00 +0200 )

Years ago I got the idea to record some demo videos for KPhotoAlbum, you can see them on the video section of the homepage. Despite how informative they are, they are getting outdated (for one thing they are using the old name for the application - KimDaBa - all the time).

Today I therefore launch a new competition to record the coolest demo video for KPhotoAlbum, and everyone can participate. The prize is $100 (payed using paypal).

The rules

  • The competition ends on Sunday June 14th 2009, 23:59 CET
  • Once the competition is over, everyone from the KPhotoAlbum mailing list gets one vote (details on voting is mailed later)
  • To participate, you must upload a video on youtube making a showcase for KPhotoAlbum, one of its features, a way that you like working with it, or whatever you think would be useful to newcomers of KPhotoAlbum.
  • The video must be recorded using KPhotoAlbum 4.0 - please mail The KPhotoAlbum mailing list if you have any problems installing that version.
  • Also, please mail blackie@kde.org a short description of the video.
  • All videos will be linked to from the video section of the homepage
  • You may submit as many videos to the competition as you like

Some technical hints

You are completely free to choose your styles, resolution, etc, but for the video to be useful to most users, I suggest:

  • Keep the length of a video to at most 5 minutes
  • Limit the resolution to 800x600
  • Make sure to speak loud an clearly
  • English is the preferred language, both for GUI and voice
  • Write a script before recording, so you know what to do
  • I found that the application recordmydesktop was a nice tool for recording such a video.

KPhotoAlbum for KDE 4 released
(11 May 2009 15:00:00 +0200 )

After years of migrating efforts KPhotoAlbum for KDE 4 was finally released today. Download

KPhotoAlbum 4.0 is mainly a port from KDE 3 to KDE 4, but it does contain one major new feature, namely stacking, and a number of minor polishing.

Stacking

Image stacking allows you to mark a number of images to be the same shot (think 10 images of Grand Canyon being almost the same, or a raw image converter and cropped in different ways).

Polishing

  • It is now possible to search for images with changed MD5 sum - very useful for searching for corrupted image files.
  • It is now possible to configure the aspect ratio in the thumbnail viewer
  • "Show this image" will now load all images in current view, thus making pressing Ctrl+A optional.
  • Recognize .flv and .erf files
  • In the annotation dialog there now is a new button for copying the annotations from the previous image.
  • Display a warning instead of black screen when current image can't be shown in the Viewer
  • Support PEF, a raw format from Pentax' DSLRs.
  • Add Edit->Copy for copying a list of URLs to selected images to clipboard.
  • Automatically hide mouse cursor and disable screensaver when in Viewer
  • Add Edit->Open List of Files menu that shows list of thumbnails that matches user-entered stuff.
  • The import dialog will now check if an image already exists in the DB with the same MD5 sum, and offer to merge the information about the images.
  • Keywords has now been replaced with Events in the default setup that people will get when they create a new database.

First snapshot for KDE 4 released!
(11 Feb 2009 23:03:00 +0200 )

Did you ever wonder if the day would come when a KDE 4 version of KPhotoAlbum was released? Well today we got much closer to that day with our first snapshot for KDE 4.

Besides image stacking, there isn't much new stuff seen from the users perspective, but that doesn't mean that nothing has happend since the last release. KPhotoAlbum has taken a huge leap, under the hood, forward with the rewrite to KDE4.

So please give us a hand, and download this snapshot, and let us know all the bugs you find.

Download the snapshot from http://www.kphotoalbum.org/index.php?page=download-snapshots

-- Jesper

KPhotoAlbum Go Cart Team
(06 Sep 2008 13:50:00 +0200 )

If you only are interested in KPhotoAlbum, and not its developers, stop reading.

So the week is soon over, we've all been shouting at each other from time to time, but overall I'd say it was reaaaally greeeeat (quote from the movie Office Space, which we saw early on.

Yesterday evening it was time for a bit of old-style fun (in contrast to the new style fun, called KPhotoAlbum development). We went out driving go cart and bowling. Lets start from the end. Tuomas obviously was a champ in bowling, so he kind of got twice as many point as the rest of us.

Go cart on the other hand was slightly different, the fattest guy on the team was also the fastest (If you think you read fastest twice, then read again :-) - faster by more than TWO rounds. I won't reveal here who won, but I urge you all to read the commit messages which might sheed some light over it all (e.g. this, this or this message)

Go cart preparation

Thursday evening, we btw also did a bit of old style fun: namely flying kites (or as Jesper called it the whole time dragons (which it is called in Danish (hmm to many parentheses (this is not lisp)))) Kites

-- Jesper

Progress of the SQL database backend
(05 Sep 2008 18:08:00 +0200 )

While Jan and Henner have been concentrating on the stacking feature, me and Jesper have been struggling in the database land.

So the SQL database support is progressing. I ported the SQL backend to QtSQL when the KDE 4 port of KPhotoAlbum was started, but back then I did not really have time to test it. So my first work here was to finish the port and make the backend work again, now with KDE 4 and QtSQL. That was not so hard after all, and now I am able to save my KPhotoAlbum database to SQL again. Currently I'm working with SQLite database, but others like MySQL and PostgreSQL will (probably) be supported too.

Then we also had few longish discussions how to make the damn thing fast. First we are optimizing the "Show thumbnails" action for all images. It's currently very slow with the SQL backend, if you have a lot of images (like 10 000 or more). We came up with an idea, that probably solves it and are already implementing it.

Schema of the database was also reviewed, leading to some field renames, which are good to make at this point before anybody uses the database for real work.

One big difference of the SQL backend compared to XML backend is error handling. Because XML backend is handled in memory and used by only a single user at a time, the operations done with it basically cannot fail, but with the SQL that is not the case. For example we have a problem when connection to database is lost while runnig the application or when there are some conflicts when users concurrently change the database.

The biggest problem for me to implement error handling was that I thought that basicly the whole user interface would have to be rewritten to do the right thing when there is an error. And so it would be a lot of work. Gladly Jan came up with a good solution to that. We just use a functor in the database API to give an error handler for the database backend and handle the errors in the database side. That functor could then pop up a dialog to ask user if she wants to try again or abort.

— Tuomas

Image Stacking support
(04 Sep 2008 11:43:00 +0100 )

The first step in image stacking is implemented! Jesper described our plan to implement this in the previous post. After some hacking yesterday night by Jan and Henner, the basic feature is up and running now.

It is possible to select a bunch of images and put them in a stack by using the new keybinding Ctrl+3. After that, it is possible to collapse this stack so that only the first image is shown.

Lets look at an example stack with a picture of Gunvald (Jespers dog) on the beach. The default view in the thumbnail view shows only the first picture:
collapsed stack view ... expanding to
expanded stack view

So finally, you can only show the best images of a snapshot series and unclutter your thumbnail view. Well - almost: it is not yet possible to pick the 'best' picture to be shown; right now it is only the first of the stack.

Now we're going to focus on the details of this feature. Like implementing a dialog for choosing the best image of a stack (the one that is displayed on top of the stack). And the visualization of the stack in the thumbnail view is probably not optimal yet - what do you think, how should it look like (mail us) ?

-henner

Development sprint day 4 - take 2
(03 Sep 2008 11:40:00 +0100 )

Things are moving fast here now! We just had a meeting to discuss what to do the rest of the week, and the outcome was this:

  • Henner and Jan will work on a new fancy feature for KPA, namely image stacking. Image stacking will allow you to mark a number of images to be the same shot (think 10 images of Grand Canyon being almost the same, or a raw image converter and cropped in different ways)

  • Jan will postpone his work on IPTC, until he gets home, and will work with Henner on the image stacking
  • Henner will likely work on scanning for new images in the background when he gets home
  • Jesper is sick and tired of the infobox by now, but will work on that when he gets..., well after the development sprint
  • Tuomas and Jesper will together work on the SQL backend the rest of the week, hopefully bring it to a stage where that can be the default by the end of the week - no more XML backend! However XML export and import will be available, and the DB will initially be a SQLLite, so no database server needs to be set up.
  • we had all to hold Jan back from adding GPS feaures to KPA this week (note: he just got a new toy ;-)

Development sprint day 4
(03 Sep 2008 08:40:00 +0100 )

Its now Wednesday morning, we are approximate half way through the one week KPA development sprint, so better make some status here.

It is almost nine in the morning, and the only people up is my wife, Gunvald (our dog) and I (Jesper). The rest of the crowd is still sleeping, on the other hand, the last commit was 2 o'clock, so I guess I'll let them sleep for another hour, before it is time for the yearly fire alarm test evil grin.

We've all worked in our own areas so far, still supporting each other with ideas, suggestions, and review.

  • Tuomas has worked on getting the SQL backend up and working again. I expect that I will help him with that the rest of the week, hopefully we will get it to a state where it will be somewhat ready for mainstream.
  • Henner has worked on improving the loading of thumbnails, and indeed the thumnbnail view feels much faster now.
  • Jan is working on IPTC import and export - the idea is to allow the user to make the mapping between the tags in scripts.
  • Finally, I have been, well what have I done?! Henner arrived half a day early compared to Tuomas, so he and I decided we would just fix the info box in the viewer, before Tuomas showed up. Well I've been working on that beeeeeep info box ever since. Well that and the speed display (the window telling you the pause between each image when running a slide show. So both windows are transparent, and looking real sexy. The problem (and the reason why I've focused so much on it) was phonon. With phonon in there the widgets was flickering, even though the phonon widget was not even visible on the screen. So I've also spend a fair amount of time trying to get video support working. The answer to it all in the end was to upgrade to a KDE 4 desktop :-o

Finally a picture both showing us and the transparent infobox
the KPA team

KPhotoAlbum Developer Sprint 2008 starts
(30 Aug 2008 16:00:00 +0100 )

There are some things the KPA developers wanted to get done for some time now (for instance working on the SQL backend) - and the best way to focus and do it, is to come together in person for some time. So the main author Jesper came up with the idea for the KPhotoAlbum Developer Sprint 2008.

Jesper is so kind to host this event - a week of discussing and coding - in his home in Denmark. Right now, Jesper, Henner and Tuomas are here already and we expect Jan later this evening.

Expect some update this week.

-henner

KPhotoAlbum 3.1.1 Released
(17 Feb 2008 21:00:00 +0100 )

It's our pleasure to announce availability of a new bugfix release of great photo and video tagging tool, KPhotoAlbum. It is available from standard place or from your favorite distribution's package database.

While new features are being added to the KDE4 version, we have decided to roll out a bugfix release that fixes some issues people have reported. This is probably the last release based on KDE3 code.

Bugs fixed include numerous improvements in the KIPI Plugins interface, fullscreen fix for some Ubuntu users and usability improvements.

KPhotoAlbum 3.1.0 Released
(23 Nov 2007 02:14:00 +0100 )

It's our pleasure to announce availability of new release of a great photo and video tagging tool, KPhotoAlbum. It is available from standard place or from your favorite distribution's package database.

New killing features™:

  • IPTC support
  • More RAW formats are recognized

Usability improvements:

  • No need to use "Select All" before launching Viewer
  • Allow copying tags from previous image in Annotation Dialog
  • Edit->Copy menu for copying a list of images to clipboard
  • Mouse cursor hiding in Viewer

And of course also many bug fixes and speed improvements.

Release notes:

  • If you decide to build with EXIF support (you should), KPA now requires exiv2-0.15 or higher
  • If you want RAW file support, please use libkdcraw-0.1.1 or newer

KDE 4 porting started of KPhotoAlbum
(01 Jul 2007 15:01:00 +0100 )

April 4th I got married, and at the same time I bought a house. Marriage doesn't take much extra time, but a house certainly does!

But this weekend I'm in Glasgow, and fortunately the terrorist missed me - actually I arrived in Glasgow 1 hour prior to the attach.

So this is the time, now I've started porting KPhotoAlbum to Qt4/KDE4, stay tuned for more information.

KPhotoAlbum 3.0.1 released.
(11 Apr 2007 12:44:00 +0100 )

PhotoAlbum 3.0.1 has been released, with huge thanks to Tuomas for pulling this of, the changes are:

  • Don't anymore ignore the selection in the first press of the Plugins menu item, when plugin loading is delayed.
  • In member group tab of the configuration dialog, when changing category from the dropdown list, items from a different category were sometimes added to members listbox. Not anymore.
  • Selecting thumbnails with a mouse made more logical and fixed a bug that sometimes prevented a selected thumbnail to be added into internal selection list.
  • Raw files were rotated twice sometimes. Fixed by Michael J Gruber.
  • Cycles in member group configuration are not possible anymore.

Translation Prize drawing
(03 Jan 2007 23:12:00 +0100 )

KPhotoAlbum 3.0 has been released with 13 languages completely translated, and another handful close to completely translated. In addition 9 languages contains full online documentation.

A huge thank you to all the translators that did a great job on this.

And now... (drums) to the prize drawing....The winner is the Portuguese team, who will receive the prize on $100. Congratulation!

Now was that a fair drawing?! Well I so much hope so. I at least went out of the way trying to make the drawing as fair as possible. As an added bonus, we had great fun picking the winner, just check out this transcript from IRC

KPhotoAlbum 3.0 released
(31 Dec 2006 13:20:00 +0100 )

It is with great pride that I here on the very last day of 2006 can announce the release of KPhotoAlbum 3.0

Major new Features

  • KPhotoAlbum is now capable of categorizing and showing videos.
  • Sub-categories are now shown as hierarchies in the browser and in the annotation dialog. In the annotation dialog it is possible to put an item into a sub-category simply by dragging it in there.

Minor new Features

  • In the annotation dialog, it is now possible to scroll the list of selected items, but pressing arrow up and down.
  • While typing in the annotation dialog, hide items that does not match the current typed text.
  • In the viewer it is now possible to use mouse wheel to scroll to the next/prev image.
  • Now it is possible to specify the icon size in used in the browser - esp usefull for showing larger images for persons in an icon view.
  • It is now possible to use the search bar in the main window, when showing folders.
  • The checkboxes in the annotation dialog are now tristate, which means that there are no need for the "merge" and "remove" checkboxes.
  • Ensure every action's keybinding in the viewer is configurable
  • Warn the user at start up if not all features are installed.
  • New splash screen.
  • It is now possible to bring up the exif dialog from the viewer.
  • New option to show categories in the thumbnail view. Now it is also possible to set tokens directly in the thumbnail view.
  • Show mega pixel in info box, and zoom factor in viewer.
  • It is now possible to see the images in pixel by pixel mode.

Important Bugfixes

  • Selection using the shift key and mouse button was broken if selected spanned several pages.
  • Improved the selection handling in the thumbnail viewer.
  • Changing the label for an image in the annotation dialog did not result in the label being updated in the thumbnail view.
  • When renaming a category also rename the category thumbnails.
  • Fixed a crash happening when saving after a category had been renamed, and that category was included in the privacy settings.
  • Use alternate EXIF reading code in case EXIV2 is not installed.
  • Bugfix: The panes in the annotation dialog would not show up correctly in translated version of KPhotoAlbum.
  • Translated version of KPA would display image dates in English, but expect month input in the translated language. This has now been fixed so it expected input in English too.
  • Somehow running the viewer always forced it to show in a new window, that was definitely against the design.
  • Searching for description did not work.
  • Improved support for the flickr plug-in. Now tags are correctly uploaded.
  • Finally nailed down the bug where the annotation dialog did not show the first image preview.
  • Directories only show the filename part now in the browser category directories.
  • Fixed problem with windows layout not being read correctly if any category name contains non-latin1 character.
  • In the settings dialog you were asked if you really wanted to delete a category. Despite your answer it would be deleted nevertheless.
  • Renamed Persons to People and Locations to Places.
  • Save configurations of special categories (should they be shown in the viewer etc).

Special Thank you

I'd like to bring a special thank you to the following people:

  • Christoph Moseler for numerous bug fixes and feature enhancements (among other support for setting tokens in the thumbnail view).
  • Clytie Siddall for helping out with the English text.
  • Baptiste Mathus for lots of bug hunting
  • Henner Zeller for support in the viewer for showing mega pixels
  • Mark Jaroski for improved support for the flicker plug-in.
  • Robert L Krawitz for improving the video detection, and for the pixel by pixel feature

New Homepage Layout
(30 Dec 2006 21:02:00 +0100 )

The winner of the splash screen competition has kindly created a new layout for the KPhotoAlbum Homepage. Thanks a lot Jaroslav Holaň.

KPhotoAlbum enters message freeze + price drawing contest
(10 Dec 2006 11:10:00 +0100 )

Today KPhotoAlbum entered message freeze, and is now ready to be translated. The release will happen Dec 31th 2006.

To bring a bit of attention to the great work the translators do I've started a small prize drawing contest which those with a complete translation of KPA participate in. The prize is $100.

I completely understands that $100 is not a whole lot of money, and this is merely to show some appreciation of their contribution.

Technicalities regarding the drawing:
Every person or team that has translated the messages in the application get one entry in the draw. Every person or team that has translated the user manual gets two entries in the draw. Only translations that are 100% complete counts.

The prize is $100 and will be transfered using paypal, so it is your responsibility to have a paypal account.

I'll extract the list of who checked in a revision latest in SVN (on dec 31th), and trust that the teams will figure out how to share the price in case several people contributed. (Heck in best case you will be able to go a couple of people to dinner, we are not talking millions here :-)

New snapshot + message freeze
(9 Dec 2006 14:35:00 +0100 )

A new snapshot has just been released, and at the same time, this means that KPhotoAlbum just have entered message freeze. No new feature, no new message strings, no minor tiny bugfixes, no, now it is almost time for a release party.

This does at the same time mean that everyone who have the slightest understanding of how to use a compiler should install this snapshot, so we can get as many bugs out of the way while waiting for the translators to do their magic.

New snapshot - KPA is frozen now
(15 Nov 2006 00:21:00 +0100 )

OK that is it, now KPA is really really frozen. Everyone please try KPA now and report every single issue you see. I will, however, try and prioritize bugs so that we can get something released now. ETA for the release 2007! Well jan 1th 00:00 2007 ;-)

New snapshot - KPA is soon freezing up
(15 Nov 2006 00:21:00 +0100 )

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.

Great new Snapshot
(07 Nov 2006 20:47:00 +0200 )

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)

New snapshot
(23 Oct 2006 14:30:00 +0200 )

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
(28 Sep 2006 13:56:00 +0200 )

The votes have been counted, and KPhotoAlbum now has a new splash screen. Congratulation to the winner Jaroslav Holaň.

Splash Screen

New Snapshot available
(24 Sep 2006 18:42:00 +0200 )

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.

Second Round of Votes started.
(22 Sep 2006 10:50:00 +0200 )

See Second round of votes for details on how to vote.

Contest Over - Time to Vote
(16 Sep 2006 08:54:00 +0200 )

The Splash screen contest is over, now it is time to vote. See http://www.kphotoalbum.org/index.php?page=splashscreen for details on the voting. Your first round vote needs to be in by Wednesday Sep. 20th 18.00 CET.

New Snapshot with greatly improved annotation dialog
(06 Sep 2006 09:21:00 +0200 )

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.

New Snapshot with DND support for reordering sub categories.
(27 Aug 2006 21:41:00 -0600 )

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.

Contest: Create a new Splash Screen for KPhotoAlbum.
(24 Aug 2006 22:46:00 -0600 )

The splash screen contest started yesterday just got more exciting. You now have the chance of winning $100. see contest info

Contest: Create a new Splash Screen for KPhotoAlbum.
(23 Aug 2006 23:00:00 -0600 )

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.

Second Snapshot Ready
(23 Aug 2006 22:40:00 -0600 )

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.

Get your snapshot now

First Snapshot of Next KPhotoAlbum version available
(22 Aug 2006 21:24:00 -0600 )

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:

  • Support for video files. KPhotoAlbum will now find all your videos, and create thumbnails for them (if you have the right software installed. If it doesn't have a look at MPlayerThumbs). With the video support you will of course be able to annotate your videos like you may annotate your images. And of course you may also show your videos, either in the viewer, or if that does not work (good enought) by invoking an external viewer from the context menu.
  • Hierarchies in the browser The browser now shows the hierarchies among your categories (Las Vegas is in USA kind of stuff). These hierarchies are also shown in the annotation dialog.
  • Improved Annotation dialog The annotation dialog now hides items as you type in the line edit, and that way makes it so much easier to find the name of a person whom you only remember the first part of.
  • Selection problems solved. And to the relief of so many of you, the selection problem from the previous release have now been fixed.
Get your snapshot now

The Icon View stay and gets improved
(20 Aug 2006 22:20:00 -0600 )

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:

Iconview screenshot

Jesper's Personal Blog
(11 Aug 2006 19:18:00 -0500 )

If you want to see what I'm up to, how KPhotoAlbum development is coming along, why not have a look at my Blog.

Progress of SQL database back-end
(6 Aug 2006 11:42:00 CST )

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 news feed
(5 Aug 2006 12:59:00 CST )

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.

Google Summer of Code Project on KPhotoAlbum
(25 May 2006 00:00:00 +0100 )

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.

KPhotoAlbum 2.2 is released
(9 May 2006 00:00:00 +0100 )

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:

  • Added a checkbox to the annotation dialog offering to remove annotations. Thanks for Robert L Krawitz for patch with this feature.
  • The datebar now has an explicit button for canceling selection.
  • Drasticly improved performance of deleting images. Thanks for Robert L Krawitz for his analysis of the problem.
  • Its now possible to select whether the newest or the oldest thumbnail should be shown first.
  • Completely reimplemented the thumbnail view, to solve a huge amount of issues with QIconView.
  • Added an EXIF dialog (available from the browser), plus the possibilities to see EXIF tags in the viewer. Set of EXIF tokens shown is configurable in the settings dialog.
  • Searches using the description field are now case insensitive.
  • Added a Exif dialog to the context menu in the browser.
  • KPhotoAlbum now stores its thumbnails in ~/.thumbnails complying with many other applications.
  • Added an option to save the index.xml file in a compressed format, this speeds up loading the xml file by approximate a factor 2.
  • KPhotoAlbum does now offer to save numbered backups of the index.xml file: index.xml~0001~, index.xml~0002~ etc. In addition this file can be zipped to preserve disk space.

The following is a list of important bug fixes since 2.1:

  • Inaccurate times now survives a visit to the annotation dialog.
  • Member maps wasn't correctly renamed when renaming a category.
  • Fixed crash when annotation dialog was up, and the datebar got a mouse move event. Thanks to Martin Hoeller for finding this crash.
  • Fixed bug where limited images on the date bar followed by a limiting images from the browser, and then unlimiting from the browser resulted in only items in the scope of the datebar selection being shown on the datebar.
  • Restart slideshow timer when user manually moves to a new image.

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.

Getting ready for release
(12 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0100 )

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.

Message Freeze
(19 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0100 )

KPhotoAlbum just entered message freeze today, and is planned to be released on Monday April 10th.

www.kphotoalbum.org
(12 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0100 )

The domain www.kphotoalbum.org now points to this site.

KimDaBa has been renamed to KPhotoAlbum
(14 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0100 )

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.

Snapshot package available - Now with a new thumbnail viewer
(12 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0100 )

Thumbnailview-screenshot

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.

Thumbnail screenshot Thumbnail screenshot

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.

Snapshot package available
(28 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0100 )

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

Searching for EXIF information
(13 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0100 )

OK, I did actually managed to pull this off - It is now possible to search for EXIF.

One Weekend and KPhotoAlbum is starting to support EXIF
(28 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0100 )

Exif screenshot

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.

New camera means a new direction for KPhotoAlbum
(24 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0100 )

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.

KPhotoAlbum is not Dead
(17 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0100 )

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.

KPhotoAlbum 2.1 has been released
(01 May 2005 00:00:00 +0100 )

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.

Major Improvements

  • KPhotoAlbum 2.1 introduces a date bar that shows statistics about images, plus support browsing, and narrowing views to a given date range. The date bar shows ranges from a year per unit down to 10 minutes per unit.
  • As a consequence of the date bar being introduced, all thumbnails are now shown together, rather than as 100 thumbnail per view.
  • In the viewer it is now possible to press a key to set a token, these tokens can the be used during browsing. This makes it easy to mark all images for say printing, by simply setting a token on each of them, and the later browsing for that token.

Minor Improvements

  • Added a search line for the items of the browser.
  • Made it possible to disable searching for images on start up. This may make KPhotoAlbum much faster at starting up.
  • Added an option to automatically load images when matches in the browser goes below a certain amount of images.
  • Postpone checking if images is on disk till the information is needed, this speeds up start up with a couple of seconds.
  • Added the possibility to zoom out from current scope, thus seeing the context of the current image
  • KPhotoAlbum will now escape all non-latin1 characters, so they still look good on web servers that seems to ignore the meta tag.
  • Added support for Canon CRW "digital negative"
  • Improves handling of EXIF data, in particular in the "Read EXIF Data" dialog. It does not overwrite the time, date, orientation, or comment data unless the EXIF data is actually present. It also adds two new options that do overwrite the time and date information with the file modification date/time if the EXIF data isn't present.
  • Added a survey, where I can get some feedback from the KPhotoAlbum users.
  • Added member group config to context menu of list select (which is the list boxes of the image property pages)

Important Bugfixes

  • The category was sometimes shown twice in the status bar.
  • Certain features got broken with the introduction of KDE 3.4's automatically adding shortcuts to items in the dialogs.
  • Markup in the editor (like highlight for spelling errors) got saved and thus displayed with the image.
  • HTML generation didn't work if the file names contained dot's like 2004-12-17-18.34.59.jpg
  • Reimplemented sort images as it could lead to image loss, plus was not guaranteed to preserve sort order for images with same key.
  • The date parser was not previous translated, while the date generator was, thus typing in date names did not work in the image config dialog, unless the translated names matched the untranslated ones.
  • When quiting KDE, KPhotoAlbum would asks if you wanted to save. This previously canceled logging out of KDE.

New snapshot
(28 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0100 )

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:

  • Added member group config to context menu of list select (which is the list boxes of the image property pages)
  • Added a jump-to-context button to the viewer, plus ensure keyboard focus would be better shown in the thumbnail view.
  • BUGFIX: When quiting KDE, KPhotoAlbum will asks if you want to save. This previously canceled logging out of KDE.
  • Use KDE's date formater to given better result in the datebar.
  • Added a survey, where I can get some feedback from the KPhotoAlbum users.
  • New images should be inserted sorted.
  • When new images are found, the datebar are now updated.

New snapshot
(20 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0100 )

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.

Perl module for manipulating the database contributed
(17 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0100 )

On the misc page you may find a perl module for manipulating the KPhotoAlbum database from perl.

New Snapshot available
(02 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0100 )

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.

New Snapshot available - including the date bar
(01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0100 )

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.

New Date bar
(28 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0100 )

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

New snapshot available
(07 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0100 )

The first post 2.0 snapshot is now available. This snapshot includes (See The ChangeLog file for full details):

  • A search bar at the top of the browser
  • Tokens (press a letter in the viewer, and that will be an item of that category)
  • An option have been added to automatically show the thumbnail view when the number of matches during browsing gets below a given count.
  • Searching for new images can be disabled during start up, this will make start up faster.

KPhotoAlbum 2.0 released
(18 Oct 2004 00:00:00 +0100 )

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.

Major Improvements

  • The most noticeable change seen from the users point of view are KPhotoAlbum's new plugin structure, code name KIPI. The plugin structure has been created together with the Digikam and Gwenview team. Our three application now shares a common plugin structure, which makes it possible to write a plugin which works with all three application.
    The 2.0 release has been postponed a number of due to KIPI not being available. It is so now, but the port of the old digikam plugins are not completely done yet, though a beta version is available. See the KIPI page to learn about available plugins.
  • It is now possible to not only share your images with your friend, you annotation can also be shared using the new import/export functionality (Who is on the image, where is it taken etc). When generating HTML pages, an export file will automatically be created, making it as simple for your friends to get your annotations, as clicking on this link. See the documentation for details.
  • KPhotoAlbum 2.0 has two important optimizations over KPhotoAlbum 1.1. First the image configuration dialog loads much faster, and second images in the viewer are pre-loaded, which makes the viewer much more snappy to work with.

Minor Improvements

  • It is now possible to sort list box items in the image configuration dialog.
  • It is now possible to sort the image by date using "Images->Sort Selected By Date and Time"
  • It is now possible to start a slide show from the thumbnail view.
  • Shortcuts can now be configured for the viewer.
  • The toolbar can now be configured.
  • It is now possible to find images where only a set of items are on (e.g. only me, and no one else)
  • It is now possible to hide the labels in the thumbnail view.
  • Thew viewer now contains a zoom out to full view function.
  • An automatic category has been created, which displays the directory of the image, making it semi possible to browse based on directory.
  • The editor for image comments now has an on the fly spell checker.

Important Bugfixes

  • Scaling of images are now done correctly, which gives much smoother thumbnails.
  • Panning now works in the viewer.
  • Fixed utf-8 encoding description in HTML pages.
  • Fixed tab order in the image config dialog

KPhotoAlbum WIKI
(17 Oct 2004 00:00:00 +0100 )

A WIKI has been created for KPhotoAlbum. Help me develop a FAQ here.

New website for KPhotoAlbum
(17 Oct 2004 00:00:00 +0100 )

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