The next release of Reveal will be a lot easier to install on Linux and BSD systems. I got Andreas to create a exiv2-config tool similar to those provided by the xml2 and xslt libraries which means in most cases compiling and installing Reveal will be as easy as compiling and installing Album Shaper, if not easier. You should not need to edit the Reveal.pro project file before compiling. I've made some small modifications to Reveal and am working on a image zoomer since the thumbnail shown is pretty small. I'm also working on OpenGL based code in general which I hope can be used for both the image zoomer and some sort of full screen slide show interface for Album Shaper. OpenGL kicks butt, but there is quite a bit to learn. Thus far I can grab screenshots from the display and map either them or arbitrary JPG's onto textured Quads, then blit them to the screen anywhere I want and animate their position, rotation, size, and opacity at any speed I desire. This all work very nicely now so I'm looking to build the slide show interface on top of my Texture and TexturedQuad classes which automatically take care of stuff like generating and freeing textures on the graphics card etc, even when image resolutions are not powers of two.

In other news, a few people alerted me that the contact form broke. I've switched to a differnt cgi script service to fix the problem. Sorry about that.

svn checkout svn://dev.robotbattle.com/exiv2/trunk .

In order to make everything Reveal does possible it was necessary for the developer of exiv2, Andreas Huggel, to add some extra functionality to the library. I also found a bug or two in the 0.7 release that he was able to fix.

Reveal kept me busy for a long time. What started out as adding Exif support to Album Shaper grew, and grew, and grew. Originally I wanted Album Shaper to auto rotate photos during import, which it now does using the CVS code, in addition to being able to show EXIF metadata somehow. EXIF metadata is stored in just about every digital photo, encoding how the photo was taken (f-stop, shutter speed, ISO sensativity, date and time, etc), as well as various processing options (sharpness, saturation, contrast), what white balance was used, if the flash fired, and much much more. EXIF was designed to keep track of all that stuff for you, but to date looking up how a photo was taken is a rather difficult error prone process. There are a number of text-based EXIF viewers out there. Usually you're prsented with a long list of fields and values, often uninterpreted, and in now particular order. If you're camera didn't record a value but you know it and you'd like to enter it your our of luck. If you scanned in a photo you can guarantee such data is not present. Furthermore, most camera makers tend to hide a great deal of the details in proprietary Makernote entries, despite the fact that very good standard Exif tags exist. Jeesh!

Reveal is intended to be a breath of fresh air. I've selected the settings I think most people will be interested in (shutter speed, aperature, ISO sensativity, flash status/mode, shooting mode, metering mode, focus mode, sensor type, subject distance, focal length and 35mm equiv, digital zoom factor, white balance mode, and contrast, saturation, and sharpness settings). These fields have been organized into groups of four and annotated with nice icons that reflect the value of a particular field. More generate fields like the date and time a photo was taken, the camera used to take it, the copyright holder and photographer, in addition to any known photo modifications are presented in a primary summary pane. For those of you who would like to get direct access to the Exif data you can do so under a details pane that clearly separates entries using alternating colors.

While I'd like to think Reveal is a step ahead in terms of usability, in terms of functionality there are a number of advances. Reveal is built on top of the Qt and Exiv2 libraries so it's cross platform. Today I'm providing Windows and Mac OSX binaries in addition to the source. I've gotten it running under Gentoo Linux so if anyone would like to produce packages for various distributions please send them my way. The OS X binary requires OS X 10.3.9 or later or 10.4 of course. I should be able to add support for 10.2 users in the future if the demand is there. At this time Reveal does not support internationalization, but a version will be released that supports i18n along side the next Album Shaper release. I'd like to think the editing capabilities in addition to Reveal's ability to decipher a good deal of proprietary Makernote data will also be appreciated. So enjoy. Reveal will also be embedded in the next release of Album Shaper as a photo info window that can be pulled up at any time similar to a layers dialog in many image editors.

I'd like to also thank Pavel Nemec for putting together Album Shaper 2.1 Suse pacakges. Hopefully Album Shaper will even been included on Suse discs in the future. One can only hope.

...that's all ancient history

You can now export all the photos in the album, or just the selected photos. You can also export the shown photo in the editing interface as well, it's simply the selected photo when editing. Now exporting is performed to the directory you indicate. No new directories are created without your approval. You have quite a bit of control over the exported filenames, and can include photo descriptions in the exported filenames as well. You also have control over the size of exported photos. You can limit them by speed based on the internet connection your friends and family would be viewing them over, or you can limit them to a specified max width/height.

In the process of accomplishing all this, I ended up ripping a LOT of code out of the Album and TitleWidget classes and convering it to a much more modular format in a new ExportTools class which is found within the ever increasing backend tools collection. If I extended this in the future to allow for specifying the export format it's pretty clear what the right way would be to add this support and the new design lends its naturally to such extensions without any duplicate code.

Now I'm starting to wonder if I should overhaul the importing process in a similar fashion. This would help reduce clutter in the Album class further, in addition to making it much easier for me to finally support importing directories at a time, possibly the most often requested feature.

Reveal, the standalone EXIF viewer I've been working on is all but ready to be released. I have a minor bug that shows up when building under Windows, and I'm waiting on an application icon, but things look pretty good on that front. The next step will be finishing off EXIF support within the rest of Album Shaper. That means stuff like embedding photo descriptions within the images themselves, repairing EXIF data, making some EXIF data available to theme authors, and providing limited EXIF information within the organize view.

In other news I'm still working on Exif support. The photo info window, which will allow for viewing and editing of Exif metadata fields, is almost complete now and is pretty robust and powerful at this point. I'm still fixing a few bugs that remain in preparation for the standalone release. I'll post some screenshots of it in action when I think the appearance and behavior are more or less fixed.

I should also mention that Album Shaper is now supported in no less than 11 languages with the new Czech translation Karel Sybera just sent me! Album Shaper continues to support a wide range of languages, operating systems, and users around the globe.

I'd also like to thank those of you who recently sent in a small contribution or other kind words. I really appreciate it.

On a sad note, this update would be incomplete if I didn't mention a recent accident which occured. My beloved Olypus 3030z was dropped down a flight of marble stairs, while on, and the lense is badly damaged. The camera otherwise works fine, the sensor appears fine and the lense can even retract and extend but the focusing mechanisms inside are all lose and don't work any more. Sigh. :-( At some point I'll have to either get it fixed, buy a cheap 3030 or other camera online, or bite the bullet and upgrade to a nice new camera. Not sure yet what I'll do but for now I have a lot of test photos to work with to continue developing Album Shaper.

Hrmm, what else? I've fixed a few bugs (100% cpu usage when trying to load a read only album, and problems with non-latin characters in album paths and added images). I also have been working on tooltips. For photos with descriptions so long they are truncated with ellipses (...) if you hover over the description itself you'll see it pop up with a tooltip no wider than the image thumbnail itself. Nice stuff.

I'm working on a new export photos for priting dialog that will allow you to limit the file sizes and customize the file names. After that I'll probably move back to EXIF work. I want to support auto rotating images on initial import, maintaining the photo descriptions in the EXIF tag, I need to repair EXIF data from image editing in AS 2 and 2.1, and finally I want to get editing of EXIF data working. If anyone can send me a couple of rotate photos that have the rotate tag embedded in them that I can test with that woudl be great since my 5 year old Olympus 3030z does not set this tag.

I'd like to thank those who have recently sent me small contributions. These mean a lot to me, and in a small way help pay for the cost of development.

I do have some other good news though. Liudmil Kamenov-bici was nice enough to translate Album Shaper into Bulgarian, so if that is your native language you can use download the translation here. Album Shaper can now be used in 10 languages and counting!

I'd also like to take a minute to thank Mike Tuffs. Mike figured out how to compile AS on his Mac setup, and found some performance problems with loading large albums. With his help I was able to make two minor changes to the source that have speed up loading large (~20 thousand photos) albums by over an order of magnitude. Thanks Mike!

Once I'm finished with the theme installer/uninstaller I'm pretty sure I'll move back to working on EXIF support. I have put a lot of effort into this and have some really nifty stuff I'm quite anxious to check into CVS.

In case you haven't been following the upcoming improvements, I've fixed a nasty bug that got into AS2.0 and persisted in AS2.1. Stupidly I broke the software updates available notification feature. Dang. Well, AS1.0b and 1.0 users should still know AS2.0 and 2.1 came out, but AS2.0 users won't automatically be informed AS2.1 or later have come out. This is now fixed and I'll be more careful about stuff like that in the future.

With the recent AS2.x releases it appears I have a lot more users out there, especially Mac OSX users, which is quite exciting. Jano's Debian package and getting into the Debian distribution also appear to have gotten Album Shaper a lot more attention, which is quite exciting. For all you new users out there, if you like the editing features AS2.x provides, expect more great things to come.

One user recently had problems setting Album Shaper to use the German translation under Windows. While his situation is quite strange, and I'm fairly certain the problem does not lie with Album Shaper, we've come up with a temporary solution for him, which also makes my life easier when testing translations. I've added a hidden user preference which allows you to force Album Shaper to use a particular translation, regardless of what your operating system's default locale is. If you're on CVS, try setting the misc/defaultLocale variable.

In other news, I've been educated a bit on colors. It seems people, myself included, find pure colors visually annoying. Pastels seem to be all the range, and are definately easier on the eyes. I've updated the histogram editor to use nice red, green, and blue pastels which look quite nice, don't you think? I briefly contemplated using a pastel green for the tilt correction tool, or even a white outline around the line that is drawn, but in the end went back to the way things are now. Once I make the move to Qt4 I'll antialias this line which should help it look even better.

Over the last month or do I've spent a lot of time working on an EXIF prototype for Album Shaper. Many users have asked for at least some form of EXIF support. In addition to auto-rotating photos if your camera is smart enough to write the EXIF orientation tag properly, I'm planning on making a large set of exposure, sensing, geometric, and processing details available to the user in novel ways no other software currently affords. In addition to easily identifying various setting values, I'm planning on supporting changing such meta data information since some cameras are not nice enough to provide it. Album Shaper will also track changes to photos (rotations, cropping, enhancements, manipulations, etc), and provide a list of such changes in a Photo Info dialog. Finally, limited EXIF data will likely be provided in the organize view itself. All this requires a lot of work, and I'm even going the extra mile and trying to make use of various camera manufacturer Makernote entries (since many cameras are not nice enough to use the standard EXIF ones). Thus far I have the EXIF/Makernote reading/interpreting code up and running. I also have the Photo Info dialog written and things are working quite nicely. The next step will be popping in write support, before merging the code into the Album Shaper code base and then moving on to updating the organize view painting code to handle EXIF data display as well. At some point I'll post a screen shot of this stuff. It's pretty amazing stuff.

I'm also putting some though, finally, into auto-downloading and updating translations and themes. Right now it's too difficult to do, and it slows me down making actual releases. Hopefully that should be solved in the next major release.

It's unclear what feature I'll work on once these things are done, although I've had my eye on printing for a while now. I need to learn how to do professional printing using Qt anyways so what better excuse then to hack it into Album Shaper? :-)

Update: Christian has already released new versions of his Metallic and Radiant themes. It was noticed that clicking on photos to bring up full size images did not use the default application to view jpeg's if one was set other than the browser. Radiant now really should be HTML strict compliant. If you've written your own theme using Album Shaper and think others might like to use it as well, let me know and I'll post a copy of it under the themes section.

On another note, in an effort to make the design and development of Album Shaper more transparent, I've added a Future Plans page under the News section, and cleaned up more of the web site slightly. This page actually lives in CVS like the Upcoming Improvements page which lists all improvements current in CVS, which means I'll be able to edit it easily and regularly as people send me suggestions. Generally, I'll put down anything people request I add to the program, but the order in which I consider suggestions can not be inferred by their order. I have a general idea how important a feature is based on how frequently people as for it, among other criteria. Also, keep in mind that while I am excited about seeing Album Shaper continue to mature and support a wealth of tools to make all our lives easier when working with digital photos, I have no interest in including every feature under the sun. Album Shaper will not become bloatware! If you want ever bell, whiste, and option under the sun, there are a number of Open Source projects that'll provide just if you're running Linux. Album Shaper is a fully crossplatform application, and with that comes the responsibility of providing a sleek, powerful, non-cluttered interface.

• Fixed up the web site to automatically link to appropriate download for your OS using trippy JavaScript + Server Side Includes. SSI rocks even more every time I use it.
• Spent a lot of time documenting the color and contrast enhancement techinques, in addition to the red-eye reduction algorithm, not to mention the new photo mosaic manipulation and also the uber cool automatic edge detector. Now all the enhancement techinques and image manipulations are fully documented.
• Put up a new Suse package Patrick Hill sent me. Thanks Patrick!

"I want to thank you for the unbelievably great Album Shaper software. I can't believe this is open source. Extraordinary user interface, great usability, great design with lots of effects like zooming etc."

"This seems like a really valuable tool to use. It's free, it's easy, and it does a lot of things that other programs don't do half as well. It's also got help to guide users to their desired outcomes. Not to mention, it makes very simple, clean albums, perfect for the web or elsewhere. I'd suggest this to anyone on DeviantART who submits dark and unbalanced photos. And, that's going to be a lot of people."

Unfortunately it appears a few bugs made it past the intensive month of beta testing. If you stress the file previous too much you might get the program to hang. More importantly, the imfamous 0kb bug where one, just one photo, sometimes got corrupted, has surfaced, but has now been tracked down and fixed! It was believed this bug had to do with rearranging photos and had been fixed since it had not shown up for a while, but it turns out it had to do with the new revert photo feature. You can keep up to date on what improvements have been made here or by checking out the Upcoming Features tab under the About dialog. I plan on releasing a version 2.1 bugfixer release probably in 1-2 weeks time.

Of course with every release comes a lot of comments that usually fall into one of two categories:

Useful:"Album Shaper 2 is great! XXX feature really helps me in so many ways, but could be even better if you did/added XXXX" Trollish:"Album Shaper 2 is great, but frankly until you add XXX it's pretty much useless"

Comments like the latter, while far and few inbetween, are a little annoying. Why? Because Album Shaper is not useless, it has helped many people around the world make photo albums for almost two years. As the program evolves it gains new functionality, and sure it will have shortcomings, but that does not mean it isn't useful. I still welcome comments, just try to make them a bit more constructive (and less trollish). Perhaps I should be more open about what things I'm planning on adding support for in the future...

Planned support:

• Really useful EXIF/IPTC support (already under development)
• Complete overhaulf of add and export dialogs
• Importing entire folders and drag-n-drop from other albums.
• Sophisticated printing support

• Importing form digital cameras
• Exporting DVD photo slideshows
• Burn backups of albums to CDR
• Publish to net via ftp/sftp with the click of a button

Over the past two weeks Album Shaper has undergone tremendous testing from users around the world using a wide variety of operating systems and window managers (OSX, Win98,ME,2K,XP, Linux and FreeBSD using KDE, Gnome, Window Maker, or FVWM). I've never had such a productive beta testing period. When released Album Shaper 2 will ship with complete translations for Swedish, Spanish, Slovak, Russian, Polish, Romanian, and hopefully Italian, Hebrew, German, and French. Want to help translating AS2 into another language? Let me know!

Testers have found a number of minor and major bugs that have been patched at an incredible rate due to the quality of the bug reports and test cases submitted. Album Shaper 2 will be a major step forward in terms of functionality, usability, and robustness. If all goes well, the beta testing process wind up before the end of the month and Album Shaper 2 will be released in teh beginning of March.

I've also documented in one place all the keyboard shortcuts Album Shaper provides. A few users have asked for shortcuts so I put a few in. Now Album Shaper has quite a few, and they are much more standardized too and can be learned in one place.

I've also been working on fixing various known bugs. A few visual glitches and problems regarding expanding photos to modify their descriptions are almost fixed now. Once I have Windows 95/98/ME support working I'll move on to tracking down and fixing the various organizing bugs that remain. It's been 9 months since the last release, and I'm guessing there are a number of new users from differnt locales. If I don't have a translation for your native language already, consider sending me a message letting me know you'd like to help in the translation push for the next release that will be starting soon.