G.P.C.

G.P.C. News

June 10, 2003

GPC development is very slow actually, because of a lot of work for my job and my home !
Anyway, I'm trying to make development going on, as well as possible.
Currently rewritten features include :

• a database plugin is now available for SQLite, as well as the "old" PostgreSQL plugin. I don't think that it will ever be possible to have another database backend more simple to use... (but I don't know if a MySQL database plugin will be written, as long as MySQL will not support views and referential integrity correctly !!).
• properties handling, as well as adding or removing pictures, is OK. Updating existing pictures has to be done.
• referencing images stored on a removable device is now fully supported (but still to be well tested).

• updating currently references pictures
• writing of "Preferences" dialog
• thumbnails and images visualization
• full EXIF properties visualization

• the new main window, displaying a selected image properties extracted from EXIF data, in a fully supported Gnome 2 desktop !
• the new connection dialog, which allows you to select database parameters based on a selected database plugin
• the new "add pictures" dialog box, which allows you to enter full URIs, as well as a directory name

November 24, 2002

After several months of "nearly standby", the development of GPC restarted !
As previously announced, the application is being completely rewritten from scratch. This is a rather big work !!
Actually, the different elements which are done include :

• GPC is now splitted in three major elements :
  - a "core library", which include most important functions of GPC. The goal of this library is to make GPC access possible from script languages such as Python, but the wrappers are still to be written... ;
  - a "basic application engine", which essentially include callbacks to handle interface events and plugins communication ;
  - "plugins", which may extend GPC with several functions. Future plugins may provide functions concerning database access, as well as images handling or anything else provided by the library ; actually, the first and only available plugin is a database plugin which handle connections with PostgreSQL databases.
• most internal components as well as plugins are now based on GTK objects, which provide a simple way to handle inheritance,... These objects are written with GOB (GTK Object Builder), which greatly simplifies the creation process of these classes.
• integration of images into GPC database is done throught a new class called "GpcImageLoader", which can handle loading of images throught the Gnome-VFS library, loading of eventually available EXIF extensions (used to initialize several GPC images properties), and thumbnails saving in PNG format ; the "ImageMagick" component may not be required anymore to produce thumbnails, and I hope that this will make this process more quick !
• handling of images properties is nearly complete ; it's now possible to update a given property for several selected images in a single step.
• handling of virtual folders is also nearly complete ; they can be built dynamically according to values of several images properties, in a very simple manner.
• films and images properties are now mixed into GPC database into a single table, to make handling of digital images easier ; a script will be available to convert previous databases into the new database format.
• properties are now displayed in a sort of simple "dockable" panel, which can be easilly shown or hidden.
• GPC configuration is handled throught GConf instead of "gnome_config".

• thumbnails visualization
• images visualization
• full EXIF properties visualization
• printing
• queries
• images manipulation plugins
• images acquisition plugins (to connect GPC with XSane or GPhoto2)

June 25, 2002

No news and no new release for quite a long time no (more than six months)... :-((
Well, after having done a little work on GPC to handle EXIF extensions, I'm now working on a completely new release of GPC, which may handle a lot of new features :

• many GPC internal components will become GTK+ objects, with the help of GOB (GTK Objects Builder).
• EXIF extensions should be fully available, with the help of the libexif library.
• heavy use of GnomeVFS will allow you to store pictures located anywhere: local hard drives, removable drives, CD-ROM disks, network locations (through HTTP or FTP),... Even GPC's repository may be in a remote location.
• thumbnails generated by GPC will be compatible with the "Thumbnails Managing Standard" : pictures of 128 (optionnaly 256) pixels wide will be stored in PNG format, locally of in GPC's repository, with file names matching MD5 hash of original filenames. The "convert" program from Imagemagick will not be required anymore, as PNG saving will be handled internally by GPC.
• images and films will not be broken in two parts, to make handling of digital pictures more easy ; every informations will be stored at the image level.
• "logical" folders will be available, based on queries or on the value of any property.
• a "quick search" option may be available.
• many new properties will be added to stored pictures.
• GPC's database schema may be completely modified, but scripts should be available to make conversion from GPC-0.7 possible.
• GPC should probably be made "MySQL compatible" rather quickly...
• images properties should be included into GPC main window, to avoid problems with several window managers.
• multi-selection of pictures will be available, to be able to modify a single property on several images in one step.

November 4, 2001

A new release of GPC, numbered 0.7, is available !
This release includes several major enhancements :

• added on-disk storage of thumbnails, to really improve performances while displaying thumbnails. These thumbnails are produced with the help of the "convert" tool, included into the "ImageMagick" package.
• new options have been added to query dialogs, to enable easy customization of several query elements.
• thumbnails are now rearranged when a window is resized.
• thumbnails captions are now truncated when they are longer than thumbnails width.
• new spanish translation.

July 22, 2001

Only one month after previous update, a new release of GPC numbered 0.6 is available !
This release includes a few but important new features :

• printing of thumbnails and of single images is available.
• the function which creates thumbnails have been modified, to REALLY reduce memory use.

June 20, 2001

Five months after previous version, GPC version 0.5 have been released !
This release includes several updates :

• gphotocoll development platform have now moved from Linux Slackware to Debian GNU/Linux (Potato).
• added gphotocoll man page, and a new chapter into documentation, relative to PostgreSQL basic 'starting rules'.
• added support for displaying thumbnails for every image included in a given film.
• default command line to "Electric Eyes" tool have been set to "eeyes" instead of "ee", to follow Debian naming policy.
• modified functions to be able to record most windows positions and states. This seems to be handled differently by several window managers (best results obtained with SawFish ; KWin and Enlightenment seems to handle window positionning differently...).
• modified functions to escape from locale problems.
• many functions have been updated to avoid GTK warnings.
• when inserting a new film or updating an existing one, the default directory is now defined as the GPC repository instead of the working directory.
• while inserting a new film or updating an existing one, filenames of images are now displayed into GPC status bar.
• replaced GpcQueryParamLib with _(GpcQueryParamLib), because these static strings were not translated correctly in GPC query dialog.
• a major bug relative to locale handling have been fixed, as well as a few other ones...
• sorry, no package for FreeBSD is available yet...

January 20, 2001

GPC version 0.4 have been released !
This release includes several modifications :

• GPC packages have been renamed, from "gpc" to "gphotocoll", to avoid any conflict with the "GNU Pascal Compiler", which was already existing. The word "GPC" is always used as a shorcut for the project name (and for this web site !), but should not be used anywhere else. Every file included in the package which was named "gpc*" have also been renamed. As binary packages were only available for Linux Slackware in the previous release, you should only take care when updating GPC on this distribution to remove the old package with "removepkg" before installing the new one, as "updatepkg" will not work.
• a new menu entry called "Add new image..." have been added in the first menu, to insert a single image in the database instead of a complete film/directory. If the film/directory which contains this image does not already exists into the database, it is automatically created and added to the collection.
• new package's formats, RPMs and DEBs, have been added to the GPC distribution (thanks to contributors). These packages have not been heavilly tested yet, but they should be installed without many problems on current distributions (except on Linux Mandrake 7.2, where GPC configuration fails because of - I think - a bad installation of GDK-Pixbuf).

December 12, 2000

• Fug fix : some functions which execute SQL commands have been modified to take care of single quotes (') in directories and files names.

December 2, 2000

GPC version 0.3 have been released !
This release includes following modifications :

• modification of database objects format between versions are better handled. GPC can't work on a database which have been modified by a higher release of GPC...
• images are now described by six new properties, which allow an exact geolocation of images : latitude, longitude, elevation, direction, pitch and roll. Direction, pitch and roll are given for the camera.
• film and images properties are now "grouped" in their respective informations dialog ; a small button in front of each category title can be used to hide or display properties related to the given category, to save space and to be able to show only used properties.
• documentation have been updated, to follow these modifications.
• added storage of last added directory. This directory is selected automatically when adding a new film.
• added "gpc_repository" root path, to be able to store films paths relatively to this directory instead of absolute ones. This enables sharing of images through a network with different mount points on different workstations. This parameter is checked on startup and if this parameter is not set after connection, GPC preferences are automatically displayed ; GPC then exits if repository root dir is not defined correctly...<

October 15, 2000

This is the first released version of GNOME Photo Collector, numbered 0.2.
Any feedback would be REALLY appreciated.

You will find the complete documentation set in the 'User's Guide' section.
Read the 'Presentation' section to discover GPC features.