Working on new release of KPhotoAlbum20 Feb 2012

We are working on a new release. New features are frozen and the current GIT master should have all the features to be expected on the release. Some more bug fixes should be done before the release. We are planning on providing a release candidate soonish before the final release, but there is no date set for that.

There has also been a major change in the forces behind KPhotoAlbum. Jesper has decided to step back and has left a huge gap for other people to fill. We want to thank Jesper for his great work in producing the best photo cataloguing software known to exist!

KPhotoAlbum has moved to git28 May 2011

KPhotoAlbum's source code is now stored in KDE's git repository instead of SVN. See The instructions on how to check KPhotoAlbum out from git

Summer vacation means much faster thumbnail viewer.16 Aug 2010

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 released15 Nov 2009

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 released25 Oct 2009

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 <franck.sicard@3demi.net> 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 <wes@hardakers.net> 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 released29 Jul 2009

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