Meet PhotoBook!

Hello Planet KDE!!!

I have the pleasure to announce my new app PhotoBook! I’ve been waiting for quite some time to put the code on public and I just did this today. So what is PhotoBook?

PhotoBook is a photo management application. I know what you are just thinking! Don’t we have gwenview and digikam already?

So before everyone starts a flamewar let me explain why I did not put my ideas on those two apps (though after talking to Aurilen – gwenview he might end up using some of the ideas into gwenview).

Starting with gwenview we have an excellent Image Viewer (It’s the application description), an Image Viewer as the name says allows for viewing images, you may think “well a photo is an Image”, but not all images are photos, gwenview is an application oriented on your file system (if you enable nepomuk you can also tag all your images), you can just browse your files and view any kind of image it supports, it even has slide shows and can play clips. You don’t organize by events for example your Krita drawings…

On the other hand we have digikam a professional application with tons of filters, geolocation, tags, lighttable, colorcorrection and the list goes on. Due to this it’s more oriented for a photographer.

Both applications integrate KIPI plugins so you can even export your images/photos to several webservices.

What I noticed is that we have a gap here, well I’d like an application to manage my photos with some of the features that digikam has, but it must be a simpler application since I want my with using it. Her files are just a mess, photos all around the hard drive if it’s not me to organize it sometimes it would be a huge mess, being honest I even prefer not touching it, apart from that, every time she’s going to upload her photos she opens KolourPaint and resize image by image so the upload is faster, I tryied several times teaching how to do that with KIPI but she always forget it.

At the beginning of this year my boss showed me iPhoto, wow, that had everything I was looking for, a pretty smart importer, photos organized by events, tags, faces, places and facebook integration, not to mention that it organizes all the photos you import so you don’t have to pass through the PAIN of manually create a directory structure…

After that day I searched for a Linux app that did that, the closest was ShotWell a Gnome app, I’d use if it wasn’t by the fact that it doesn’t has an smart importer, and well I’m not a Gtk fan so I decided to do a Qt application that could fill my needs.

QML is everywhere on the news, it’s the Qt hype, I had never tried it (it was before the printer-manager QML plasmoid), playing with some Qt demos I said to myself this will look awesome with QML, drawing the solution and playing with it at first was a frustrating experience, without Desktop components it’s a major pain as I’m not very skilled with inkscape and I don’t like to waste time learning a tool just for one or two icons… so I gave up a few months ago.

Time passed and I got robbed, the window of my car got crashed, my company’s laptop stolen and so was my wife’s camera, 8 GB + what was on the laptop of photos lost, the laptop could have a backup (my fault), but the 8 GB was actually the fault of not having a tool to smart handle the import. At the same time Marco Martin (notmart), posted his improvements on a QML File Browser for Active that had a feature I couldn’t reproduce in QML.

This motivated me to get back to my old code, now I had more experience with QML, but still the pain of creating everything was there, but now I don’t really care, Qt 5.(something) will have it… then I just replace 😀 the core of the app is just pure Qt, even the code that provides the images, the thumbnails are all C++ code.

I have a bunch of stuff to say about what this app already does, and what it will do, but this post got too huge already… If I were you I’d be sleeping by now… 😛

So say Hello World!

Importer for removable media

You can find the code in https://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/graphics/photobook

As I’m no CMake expert after you compile the code you will need to create a link called qml_files that points to the qml files, and run photobook from the directory containing this link. If you know how to improve this please give me a hand.

The ui is still a bit of a mess, and PLEASE this is alpha software, the indexer might change, the directory layout might change, right now is just a tech preview…

I’ll soon make more posts about how the importer works and what you can do with it 😀

Enjoy 😀