Solang 0.3 released

We are glad to announce the release of Solang 0.3.

Solang is a photo manager for GNOME and this release contains several
new features and improvements.

* A new logo and .desktop file.

* Context sensitive popup on right-clicking a photo in the browser
renderer.

* Folder exporter to export selected photos to a folder.

* Improved editing abilities. A new GEGL based editing engine; and
support for brightness, contrast, saturation and scaling. Of these
only the first two operations are based on GEGL. The rest will be
migrated as GEGL improves in the future.

* Introduced a histogram in the editor renderer and the property
manager.

* It is now possible to copy a set of applied operations from one
photo and paste it onto others.

* New vertical toolbox for the editor renderer. The flip, rotate and
scale operations are now placed in this toolbox, and their
corresponding entries have been removed from the menu.

* Support for slideshows.

* The date, property and tag managers, and the search basket are
hidden when using the editor renderer.

* The main horizontal toolbar style has been set to "icons only".

* Use a black background for the photo when in fullscreen mode and do
not draw a frame it.

* New dependencies on BABL and GEGL.

We would like to thank Yasen Pramatarov and Andrea Zagli for contributing the
Bulgarian and Italian translations respectively; and Angella Inzinga for
creating a logo.

For more information on Solang, including links to file downloads,
please see the project page http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/solang.

Please email bugs or suggestions to .

Here are the compressed sources:
http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/solang/solang-0.3.tar.gz
http://rishi.fedorapeople.org/solang/solang-0.3.tar.gz

Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]:
http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/solang/solang-0.3.tar.gz.sig
http://rishi.fedorapeople.org/solang/solang-0.3.tar.gz.sig

[*] You can use the signature file to verify that the corresponding
file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download
both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command
like this:

gpg --verify solang-0.3.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
then download the project keyring from
http://sv.nongnu.org/project/memberlist-gpgkeys.php?group=solang&download=1
and run this command to import it:

gpg --import solang-keyring.gpg

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

Better editing support in Solang

As I had indicated in the last post, I have been working on improving the editing capabilities of Solang. The results have been the following:

1) Integration of Gegl as a backend that can be used for some operations. This opens up a vista of new opportunities. For this release we have only 2 editing features that use the Gegl back-end: Brightness and Contrast. Other operations will be moved to gegl once the speed issues are resolved in Gegl code.
2) Histogram for photos in both properties pane, as well as in editing.
3) The following editing features are supported now:
a) Rotate by right angles
b) Flip vertically and horizontally
c) Up and down scaling
d) Brightness adjustment
e) Contrast adjustment
f) Saturation
4) Last and my favorite one: Copy and paste a set of editing operations done on one photo to others.
The changes are currently published as patches on the solang-devel list. They will be pushed to the git repo soon.
On the non-editing side, debarshi has added support for slideshow and has also written an exporter that can export to a directory and optionally creates a zip archive out of the photos being exported.

Histogram in Solang

Been long time since the last release ... but lots of things are happening behind the scenes. First of all, debarshi added slide show support in solang. He is working on photo exporter architecture at the moment.
I am working on development of an improved editing architecture. To this end I managed to write code for adding support of editing using GEGL. I was personally inclined to move to GEGL as it would allow us to do 16 bits editing and as a direct consequence proper RAW processing. However, some parts of GEGL are too slow at the moment.. I am sure they will be fixed soon by the good folks working on GEGL. Therefore, we decided to go with 8 bits per channel editing support only at this time. The backends can be switched fast. We will support simple operations at the moment .. ones that can be done by Gdk::Pixbuf directly or have fast implementations in GEGL.
The back-end switching systems are in place now (not in git though...). I am working on a filter architecture to enable fast creation of filters (operations) along with dynamic GUI creation for each filter. The full thing will be committed in one go. To this end, over the weekend I created a back-end and a corresponding widget to show histograms. At this moment it supports 8-bits-per-channel images only (it reads from a memory buffer that is currently set to a Gdk::Pixbuf object). However, it supports both linear and logarithmic histograms. It also supports a per-channel histogram generation option. The histogram has been added to both the browser and editor pages of solang. I am attaching a few screen-shots below.

Solang 0.2 released

We are glad to announce the release of Solang 0.2.

Solang is a photo manager for GNOME and this release contains several new features and improvements.

* Pagination bar and zoomer for the browser renderer.

* Support for zooming within the enlarged renderer.

* UI elements for navigating within the browser renderer -- previous page, next page, first page and last page.

* Added a new non-deletable "All Photos" tag.

* Queue based object deletion framework. Ability to delete tags and remove them from selected photos.

* Flickr importer to import photos from Flickr.

* Editor infrastructure. A new editor renderer; and support for rotation, flipping, and undo, redo of operations.

* Various improvements to the importer dialog, importer, progres dialog and progress observer.

* New dependencies on Flickcurl, LibSoup and WebKit Gtk+.

* Ported to Exiv2 version 0.18.

We would like to express our special thanks to Andrea Colangelo and Hicham Haouari for their reports, and efforts in getting Solang packaged for Ubuntu and Fedora respectively.

For more information on Solang, including links to file downloads, please see the project page http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/solang.

Please email bugs or suggestions to <solang-users@nongnu.org>.

Here are the compressed sources:
http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/solang/Solang-0.2.tar.gz
http://rishi.fedorapeople.org/solang/Solang-0.2.tar.gz

Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]:
http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/solang/Solang-0.2.tar.gz.sig
http://rishi.fedorapeople.org/solang/Solang-0.2.tar.gz.sig

[*] You can use the signature file to verify that the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this:

gpg --verify Solang-0.2.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key, then download the project keyring from
http://sv.nongnu.org/project/memberlist-gpgkeys.php?group=solang&download=1
and run this command to import it:

gpg --import solang-keyring.gpg

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

Working towards Solang-0.2

Time is nigh for the 0.2 release for solang.
First of all a news: We have a solang-users list now.

Before we go into the details of the next release, I would like to address some issues and questions that were raised as a part of the comments to my blog and on this blog.

First of all MANY, MANY thanks for the interest. We are very happy you have noticed this project.

1) Solang is NOT an f-spot "clone". It contains / will contain features that f-spot may or may not ever have. (Searching using multiple dates, searching using photo-property, paginated browsing etc). It also lacks a lot of features that f-spot even currently provides (A plethora of editing options and filters etc)
2) Jaunty compilation issue: The git version of solang should be compilable. Exiv version 0.18 has been supported. The author of this article has been kind enough to test it out.
3) In-photo tagging: We are NOT planning to do this. Instead we plan to do something better... we plan to port solang to windows in the near future. The back end database path will be made configurable, so that the database may be placed in some shared user area visible to all OS installations on a host.
4) Import from f-spot: We are planning to do this probably in the next release. If this is an immediate requirement, please let us know on solang-users mailing list and we will try to make a patch release for this after the 0.2 release.
5) Exif-IPTC editing... we haven't decided yet .. but maybe soon enough ..

A request to all users, please file bugs at Solang Project Page (needs login). Also, we are available at sane indian working hours (and sometimes even the insane ones) on the #solang room on irc.freenode.net. Feel free to drop in to let us know of feature requests, any required build assistance, rants and whatever you feel like (we discuss movies also on the room .. :-P)

Okay, so, for the next release we present the following feature list:
1) Paginated views for memory and speed efficiency (in git already)
2) Icon zooming in browser view (in git already)
3) Undoable delete feature for tags and photos (partially in git)
4) Undoable basic editing (flip/rotate/scale) (underway)
5) Batch editing of pictures (hopefully) (TBD)
6) An importer from flickr (Underway)
7) A basic exporter that exports selected photos to a directory (hopefully through a basic editing pipeline) (TBD)

Another thing... it would be nice if someone could find the time to create some user documentation for solang... otherwise, it will take some time for us to come up with a decent doc for this.

Okay, enough talk... back to coding... and we are waiting to hear from you.

Solang...

Long is the way And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light

After many a long day and sleepless night we are pleased to announce Solang, a (or yet another if you may please) photo manager for GNOME.

Why solang? Well, I have a busted old laptop (a worn out HP NX6115 with 512 MB RAM) that aches and burns to manage my photo collection using the so called state-of-the-art foo written in the state-of-the-art bar language. So we thought, maybe re-inventing some wheels are not totally misplaced excursions of the mind. Besides I need to get something that runs on my ol' buddy.

Solang will not become a one-stop-shop for all photographic needs. We may never decide to give top-notch editing support in Solang. IMO, the UFRAW, RawStudio, Gimp and CinePaint stack do quite nicely for RAW processing and general photo-retouching. Solang will try to act a front-end for all photo-storage containers (Folders, CD/DVD, PicasaWeb, Flickr etc). We also want fast operation, powerful search capabilities and a flexible and extensible design.

The first developer version of Solang is available at: https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/solang

Unfortunately the Savannah servers have gone Kaput!! for a few days. I am sure the good folks at GNU will get them back online soon enough. For the time being solang can also be found at: http://rishi.fedorapeople.org/solang/

Please checkout the README file before you do anything. Use at your own risk!!
Also practically speaking there may be som changes in the back-end database in the later releases. Oh and one more thing, currently you cannot delete anything (Tags/Photos) from Solang. We are working on an undoable deletion system. Should be committed shortly.

Feedback on this will be highly appreciated. You can also subscribe to solang-devel list. We will start a solang-users list after a few days.

Below are some screenshots of Solang in action:

Coming Soon to a PC near you