KPhotoAlbum 2.2 is released08 May 2006

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.

Message Freeze18 Mar 2006

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

Getting ready for release11 Mar 2006

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.

www.kphotoalbum.org11 Mar 2006

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

KimDaBa has been renamed to KPhotoAlbum13 Jan 2006

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 viewer11 Jan 2006

Over the Christmas holidays I got utterly annoyed by the thumbnail viewer - well it has been a pain in the back for a long time, because it had bugs I was unable to solve despite days of investigation, and because it did not allow me to configure the look and feel very well. Therefore I rewrote it from scratch.

The result is a much better looking thumbnail viewer, and as an added bonus, scrolling is now much faster than with the old one. In addition I stole an idea from Bibble wrt to resizing the thumbnails - now simple press the middle mouse button, and move it to resize the thumbnails.

Initially I planned to throw away support for reordering images, but public demand made me change my mind. However, KPhotoAlbum will now ask for permission before doing the actual reordering, which hopefully will avoid that people get their images reordered by accident.

Finally, as an added bonus, it was now very simple to implement a request I've heard a few times, namely the possibility to specify if thumbnails show be shown with the newest one first or last. So I implemented that request ;-)

I created a new snapshot which you may find from the side bar, choose Download->snapshots.