KPhotoAlbum News

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 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.