GPC is my first contribution to the world of Linux and Free Software.
I wrote this program because I have many photos (more than 3500 24x36mm negatives or diapos)
that I wanted to classify easily, but didn't found any tool corresponding to my needs
(many tools for Linux or Windows can be used to visualize images, not classify them !).
GPC have been developed with the following goals in mind :
- store informations about each film and image.
- store keywords and comments on each film and image.
- store these informations in a relational database, for quick access.
- allow visualization of every image, scanned at 'screen resolution'.
- allow queries, to retrieve images corresponding to given criterias.
The results of these needs where as follow :
- GPC have been developed for the GNOME Desktop environment.
- as most of the GNOME projects, GPC have been developed in C language.
- informations are stored in a PostgreSQL database (I prefer PostgreSQL instead of MySQL,
because PostgreSQL have very more advanced features, and can handle rules, transactions,...).
- films and images are organized like this : images files are stored in
different directories ; each directory is supposed to contain images of only one film.
- for each film, informations which can be stored are a unique ID, an absolute pathname,
a kind (diapo, negative film,...), a classification number, a film maker and a film model,
an ISO sensibility, a film size, a camera maker and a camera model, a period, a short free
description and a list of keywords.
- for each image, informations which can be stored are a unique ID, a film ID, a filename,
a size (width and height), a MIME type (as retrieved by GNOME), a classification number
(commonly the image number on the film), a lens maker and a lens model, a focal length, an
aperture value, a speed value (given as 1/x second), two notes (interest and artistic quality),
six values relatives to image position (latitude, longitude, elevation,...),
a short free description and a list of keywords.
- many values are stored in references tables, to keep control on used values which can be
reused easily. GPC can even ask you for validation before entering new values.
- you can execute queries, to retrieve films and images corresponding to any given criteria.
- images loading and visualization is processed throught the GDK-Pixbuf library.
You can find more informations about GPC and the way to use it in the
'User's Guide'.