News

KPhotoAlbum 4.5 released15 Jul 2014

Today we are happy to release KPhotoAlbum 4.5, a new version of a photo management and tagging application for KDE. Read on to learn about all of these changes - there are quite a few, after all it has been a year and a half since KPhotoAlbum 4.4 was released.

Android client of KPhotoAlbum

If you have an Android tablet (and a spouse or a kid that would like to see your images) then this is likely the most interesting change to you. If you don't have all of the above, then it likely doesn't mean much to you :-)

The Android client is available on google play. It requires KPhotoAlbum 4.5 as the client isn't a stand alone application, but rather a viewer for your existing database running on the desktop.

View the video on KPhotoAlbum on Android

Positional Tags

Another major feature in KPhotoAlbum 4.5 is positional tags. These allow you to tag individual sections of an image (say people).

View the video on positional tags in KPhotoAlbum 4.5

This feature was contributed by Tobias Leupold, welcome to the KPhotoAlbum team!

Improved saving speed

When I did a git log to see exactly what had changed since the latest release, I was surprised to see this on the list, as I was rather sure it already was in the previous release. I was wrong, so read this blog on speeding up saving to see what is in store for you.

Lots of other changes

Below you can see a list of other changes and bug fixes, which is far from complete.

  • New Feature: Added an Android client, which can display images from a running KPhotoAlbum on the desktop
  • New Feature: Tags can now be associated with an area of the image.
  • Enhancement: Backspace now shows the previous image in the Viewer
  • Enhancement: Implement file copy dialog in the Viewer.
  • Enhancement: Added option to ignore specific EXIF comments. (Some digital cameras set a non-configurable EXIF comment in each image. With this option you can specify which comments should be ignored.)
  • Bugfix (#254641): The current image is now highlighted when selecting images using the keyboard.
  • Enhancement: On first start, the image folder defined in KDE settings is used.
  • Bugfix: find thumbnail even for short videos (Thanks to Christoph Moseler for identifying the problem, and sending an initial patch)
  • Enhancement: Implemented the Page-Up and Page-Down key presses to select the previous and next image in the annotation dialog
  • Bugfix: Fix image import for kim files with external images.
  • Bugfix: Fix crash when reading .kim files.
  • Enhancement: Updated HTML darkJS theme
  • New Feature: Maintainance->sort all by date and time (With this command, you don't have to worry about stacks, locked images, or similar)
  • Bugfix: Prevent thumbnail progress bar from showing indefinitely when no MPlayer is installed.
  • Enhancement: Make thumbnail cache readable by all users. (This makes sharing a KPhotoAlbum database actually possible.)
  • Enhancement: Implement caching for thumbnail files.
  • Enhancement: Recalculate md5sum when image is changed by kipi-plugin.
  • Bugfix: Mark database dirty when images are deleted.
  • Enhancement: Run without video thumbnail/length support when mplayer is missing.
  • Bugfix: Don't try creating thumbnails for images not on disk.
  • Enhancement: Use cached QImage instead of invoking KIcon::pixmap on broken files
  • Enhancement: Add --info to script/kpa-backup.sh.

Thank you to everyone involved.

I wont even try to list what individuals contributed, but git log shows these names, so thanks for your contribution!:

  • Miika Turkia
  • Johannes Zarl
  • Tobias Leupold
  • Robert Krawitz
  • Andreas Neustifter
  • Jan Kundrát
  • Pino Toscano
  • André Marcelo Alvarenga
  • Yuri Chornoivan
  • David Edmundson
  • Dominik Broj
  • Reimar Imhof
  • Jesper K. Pedersen

— Jesper.

Second preview of KPhotoAlbum 4.5 ready23 Jun 2014

We are now getting close to KPhotoAlbum 4.5. Today I just made a snapshot available, please test and give us feedback. Download the new version

This version also comes with a much improved android client available from google play.

The following is likely a non complete list of changes since KPhotoAlbum 4.4:

  • New Feature: Added an Android client, which can display images from a running KPhotoAlbum on the desktop
  • Bugfix: find thumbnail even for short videos (Thanks to Christoph Moseler for identifying the problem, and sending an initial patch)
  • Enhancement: Implemented the Page-Up and Page-Down keypresses to select the previous and next image in the annotation dialog
  • Bugfix: Fix image import for kim files with external images.
  • Bugfix: Fix crash when reading .kim files.
  • Enhancement: Updated HTML darkJS theme
  • New Feature: Maintainance->sort all by date and time (With this command, you don't have to worry about stacks, locked images, or similar)
  • Bugfix: Prevent thumbnail progress bar from showing idefinitely when no MPlayer is installed.
  • Enhancement: Make thumbnail cache readable by all users. (This makes sharing a kphotoalbum database actually possible.)
  • Enhancement: Implement caching for thumbnail files.
  • Enhancement: Recalculate md5sum when image is changed by kipi-plugin.
  • Bugfix: Mark database dirty when images are deleted.
  • Enhancement: Run without video thumbnail/length support when mplayer is missing.
  • Bugfix: Don't try creating thumbnails for images not on disk.
  • Enhancement: Use cached QImage instead of invoking KIcon::pixmap on broken files
  • Enhancement: Add --info to script/kpa-backup.sh.

To compile the desktop version, you need to ensure that the Qt4 version of QMake is found. For me it worked like this:

cmake . -DQT_QMAKE_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/qmake-qt4 -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/tmp/test
make
make install
/tmp/test/bin/kphotoalbum

— Jesper.

Preview of KPhotoAlbum for Andoid12 May 2014

Over the last few month, I've worked hard on a KPhotoAlbum version for Android. The way that it works is that the android application will connect to a running KPhotoAlbum instance on your desktop, to allow you to browse through your images as if you were sitting behind the desktop.

Anyway, a picture is worth a thousand words, so a video must be worth a thousand pictures, so please check out this video on youtube which shows it all in action.

This is the first alpha version available, it has its glitches, but it works quite well nevertheless, so please do give it a try, and report back to me directly (blackie@kde.org) or to the KPhotoAlbum mailing list.

To use it, you need booth an Android version for your tablet or phone (KPhotoAlbum version 0.0.4 from google play), and you need to compile KPhotoAlbum yourself for the desktop (either from download.kde.org or from git where you need SHA 6897e0b from branch wpi/android)

To compile the desktop version, you need to ensure that the Qt4 version of QMake is found. For me it worked like this:

cmake . -DQT_QMAKE_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/qmake-qt4 -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/tmp/test
make
make install
/tmp/test/bin/kphotoalbum

— Jesper.

KPhotoAlbum 4.411 Feb 2013

I am pleased to announce that KPhotoAlbum 4.4 is available for download.

The main improvements on this version are support for libkipi 2.0.0 and greatly improved save time for the image database. Now it is also possible to remove duplicate images while merging the tags to the remaining image. And naturally a couple of bugs got fixed as well.

— Miika

A Productive weekend - Saving now 3-4 times faster03 Feb 2013

This week we discussed saving times on the KPhotoAlbum IRC channel, which made me give it a shot at rewriting the saving code from QDom to QXmlStreamWritter. I had a hunch that it would give quite some nice improvement in saving speed.

Now, if you have ever participated in one of my Qt training classes, you will likely have heard me say something like NEVER EVER trust your own hunches on where time is spend in your applications, USE A PROFILER!. Rewriting the code resulted in a disappointing 10% time reduction on saving, not the 50% or more I had hoped for. Sigh! Why do I never listen to myself?!

OK, so when I had callgrind and kcachgrind in action anyway, I could just as well look at what made it relatively slow at saving, and I found, not surprisingly, that it spend quite a bit of time in places I wouldn't have guessed in a million years. I got an impression 18% reduction simply by caching whether the XML file should be in compressed or readable format.

In total, depending on format used, and whether your KPhotoAlbum is build in debug or release mode, I got a reduction of time spend when saving between 62% and 73%, which means a speed up of 3-4.

Saving now takes less than 400ms on my database with 13800 images (of which more than 95% are tagged). I guess it will be a while before I need to revisit the speed of saving :-)

— Jesper

KPhotoAlbum 4.326 Sep 2012

I am pleased to announce that KPhotoAlbum 4.3 available for download.

New features were described when announcing the beta version. Only minor bug fixing and addition of pattern based search was done since then.

— Miika