News
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
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.
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 :-)
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.
KPhotoAlbum 4.3-beta107 Sep 2012
Whe have a beta build available for the upcoming KPhotoAlbum 4.3. Give it a spin and give feedback to the mailing list (IRC and bug tracking are also viable options).
New features concentrate on video support improvements and background tasks. Also the database backend has been dropped completely leaving the XML backend as the only option. Automatic stacking of images based on file version detection has been brought to the maintenance menu giving control to the user instead of only performing the action upon starting of KPhotoAlbum.
Tutorial on new video features18 Aug 2012
Jesper has posted a video tutorial on YouTube demonstrating the new features that are available on the current development version of KPhotoAlbum.