KPhotoAlbum 2.1 has been released30 Apr 2005

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 snapshot27 Mar 2005

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 snapshot19 Jan 2005

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 contributed16 Jan 2005

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

New Snapshot available01 Jan 2005

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 bar31 Dec 2004

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.