Some great KPhotoAlbum development happening!

September 4, 2008 in Open source | No comments

KPhotoAlbum (Ubuntu package kphotoalbum) is the photo archive software of my choice. It handles my around 50 000 (yeah, I know my archive requires some cleaning..) photos pretty nicely.

Recently I’ve started to worry if I’ve chosen smartly, if I should have gone for digiKam, the photo management software that ships with KDE. It’s received some really nice features lately (like fuzzy search) and the development been really fast.

But then a while ago I heard that the Great Guys of KPhotoAlbum are going to travel to Denmark and have a week long Development Sprint to work on the KDE4 port of KPhotoAlbum. So this is the week when it’s happening. Jesper, Tuomas, Henner and Jan have done a great job not only working on the KDE4 port but also adding some really cool features that at the moment include (all of them not finished yet):

  • Multi core support for faster image loading and thumbnail generation on new computers (source)
  • Thumbnail file format change from png to ppm for up to 10 times faster thumbs loading (source)
  • Possibility to ’stack’ images: select the best shot of a series and hide the others behind the best one (source)
  • EXIF/IPTC/XMP import/export thingy (source)
  • SQL database: faster operations. By default uses sqlite so do need to setup database server (source)
  • New transparent info box for the image viewer (source – check the screenshot)

For more information, check these sites:

Blackie’s blog
jkt’s blog
KPhotoalbum News
KPhotoalbum mailing list archive
Commit stats – around 70 commits this week so far!

Way to go people! I like you letting us users know what’s going on and I’ll be enjoying the new features, mostly the speed-up to generate and load thumbnails!

This is what I call development :)

Related posts:

Tags: , , , ,