Photo
Waiting for the signal from a galaxy far far away
Trying to play around with long exposure shots.
This is a 15 seconds shot, taken around 10.39pm IST. As the clouds were moving very fast, they created a nice effect in the sky. No editing done on the show as I took RAW+JPEG.
The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.6
Who wants a pony ?
If you want one you can grab from here.
Pony is a simple image manager written in PyKDE4.
Few weeks back I lost my external hdd where I kept most of the photographs I took in last two year. It is kind of heartbreaking. But first thing came in my mind is not to get into this kind of situation again. So, decided to backup photos also in DVD(s).
But the problems started at the same time, if I do so, how can I figure out which photo is in which disk ? I know digikam is having a feature like this (to have external collections) but last time when I tried that it never worked. Though I am mostly a KDE user but I was using gthumb as image viewer except when I click on dolphin which opens up gwenview.
My workflow:
- Take photographs
- Copy them in hdd using File browser (Dolphin)
- View them using gthumb
- if required right and edit using gimp
- Upload the image to flickr
As I keep my photographs ordered in directories, gthumb is very helpful and I like the UI as it does not provide most of the fancy stuffs other image managers do.
After looking for few days I decided to write my own image manager which can suite properly with the simple workflow I follow.
The design goals:
- It takes some amout of time to create thumbnails when the user visits a folder first time, but after that it stays fast as I really don’t mind for the time on the first view. I tried with a folder which contained 13GB images.
- Currently shows only jpeg images as we generally keep photos in that format
- One can add tags to the images, currently no edit tag option is available
- One can search based on tags (implemented), name or EXIF data or based on dates
- Even if the file is in an external media it should show the thumbnail
- It is having a flickr uploader. Currently it only adds title,tags,description. Photosets and privacy&safety will work in future releases
- One should be able to add/edit/delete external medias as catalogs
Now this is a very basic form of the code base continously being hacked. Most of the planned stuffs still needs to be written. To get the thumbnails fast I kept them in db (still the db seems to be small ) and used a web framework based ORM to do so, yes it is Django :p. I know one may complain of this dependency but it is so nice that I couldn’t leave it :)
MathStuf and Kevin_Kofler in #fedora-kde , #qt and Riddell ,pinotree, annma helped a lot to learn different pieces of KDE and Qt. nicubunu did extensive testing from the very beginning. Thank you guys for your support.
I still need to improve the UI so any help is welcome :)
Btw, the name of the project came as suggestion from sankarshan and mether.
Hugin
After reading Richard’s entry, I decided to try hugin again with autopano-sift-C package from rpmfusion.
The result: 360 degree view of my apartment area
OLPC Pune meet and photo management
This Sunday I went to OLPC Pune meet to give a talk on activity development. The students seem be very enthusiastic. The talk lasted for around 2 hours. Photos can be found here.
On the other side, I was looking for a photo catalogue software which can catalogue my photos on DVD or any other removable media, it should also allow me to search them based on EXIF data and tags and should show thumbnail(s) in the result.
I generally use digikam and gthumb too manage and view the photos. In digikam I never being properly able to catalogue photos on DVD (never tried on the last few updates) and gthumb is too slow in showing the thumbnail or full screen views for the large size photos I take. I prefer gthumb over over digikam to view the photos due to the simpler UI.
Finally decided to write my own app for this, which will *not* have any editing features, Gimp is the tool I use for editing. Watch this video (3.2MB) and please comment if the thumbnail creation / viewing is fast or not ?