Who wants a pony ?

by Kushal Das

If you want one you can grab from here.

Pony is a simple image manager written in PyKDE4.

pony

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:

  1. Take photographs
  2. Copy them in hdd using File browser (Dolphin)
  3. View them using gthumb
  4. if required right and edit using gimp
  5. 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.