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:
22 comments:
It's very nice to see initiatives like this in Photo management department for GNOME.
Keep up the good work!
Hm, it doesn't compile in jaunty jackalope, some packages (exiv at least) are too new.
Thanks for trying it out. Actually, I use debian sid and the dependedncies are based on that. I know that this doesn't yet compile on F11, now adding jaunty to the list. We will try to port this as soon as possible. Keep an eye on this blog and you can also subscribe to solang-devel to receive updates on this situation.
Yes ! I hope that this Project would be better than F-Spot. F-Spot ist slow and tagging/searching awful.
Where are the tags stored ? In a database... or directly in the picture ?
If in the picture... do you test it for windows too ? So that windows-users can read the tags too ? e.g. in the vista photogalery.
Please, give all the power to comfortable tagging (windows-conform and for several pictures at once), searching (AND, OR) and browsing (quick thumbnailscrolling) :-)
For editing... there are enough other programs.
The GUI seems to be nice :-)
Thank you !
Oktarius
(also Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope User)
I am really, really excited about this project. I do not like Mono, so no F-Spot for me. The other choices are ok, but we need a new non-Mono photo management application for GTK. Thanks!
Nice project!
I hope that once it will be widely usable, it will be able to import F-Spot photo libraries and tags: a lot of people have spent a lot of time tagging and ordering their pictures with F-Spot... (ehm... I did :-) )
Federico
Hi,
I'm not able to compile on debian, something about cairomm even if libcairomm-1.0-1 is already installed..
By the way, seems to be a great project, I'll give you feedback :)
This looks great. I was wondering if Solang will offer editing capabilities for EXIF, IPTC, and XMP meta data?
I'm actually very happy to see this! Being a Mono hater myself, and seeing Gthumb being pretty much stuck, it's great to have a C++ Photo Manager for Gnome.
Now for the feature requests (pretty much what i look in photo management nowadays):
1. Please allow us to place face tags ala Facebook, with square boxes on the pictures. General tags can only go so far...
2. Brownie points: Consider allowing a MySQL backend, so pictures can be shared across computers with their metadata (i.e. tags) intact. No need to save the pictures themselves. Just something like a tie between PictureMD5/SHA1 and Tags.
Otherwise it looks great. I cant wait for this to land in Debian :D
/ak
Also, it would be great to have some support for indexing and tagging movies, since almost every consumer photo camera can now produce these. No video editing/retouching in the editor, video playback could even be handled by an external program, but I just wish I could import all media from my camera. F-spot has been sluggish to include this feature too ...
IMO, the UFRAW, RawStudio, Gimp and CinePaint stack do quite nicely for RAW processing and general photo-retouching.
Only if you don't mind spending hours on what you could do in Lightroom in 30 minutes.
Sure, I like them for what they can do, but all current free/libre solutions do not provide optimal workflow.
Give some thought to using Tracker as your storage location. Get all photos by querying the "Images" service, and the tags stay in the Tracker DB.
Hello,
Nice product even it does not yet configure under Ubuntu 9.04.
Take a look at the Gscreendump project if you're interested in adding a simple image-manipulation support to your product.
http://code.google.com/p/gscreendump/
GNOME should have a common library that makes simple image manipulation easy, such as adding a frame to the image, adding label or title etc.
Alex.
Wow, I'll keep an eye on this. Thank you for making a photo management app for gnome. Hope it goes well.
solang compiles on Fedora 11, to have precompiled binaries for Fedora 11, visit the following page :
http://hicham.iblogger.org/FedoraRepo
you can install solang on Fedora 11 :
su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing install solang'
Has Solang stopped? All seams to have gone very quiet.
Is is still being deveoped?
Hello. Could you work conjointly with fotoxx developer so that Solang catalogs and Fotoxx does photo editing and enhancing. Fotoxx provide easy yet advanced feature but integrate a fairly limited catalog feature. Could simplify and focus development.
Good work. Keep it up. Keep blogging and thanks.
solang: error while loading shared libraries: libgegl-0.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Help ) What does it mean? The libgegl-0.0 is install on my system.
No video editing/retouching in the editor, video playback could even be handled by an external program, but I just wish I could import all media from my camera. F-spot has been sluggish to include this feature too
I have just come across this project today, it sounds like it has a lot of potential from what I have read here.
I have been struggling to find a suitable photo management application I am happy with.
- F-spot is slow and crashes often and of course uses Mono!
- Picasa is fine but not native (Uses Wine) and alot of RAM!
- Shotwell has been chosen to replace F-spot on Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick). I like Shotwell but it is lacking support for RAW files and versioning which 'is' a feature I do like in F-spot.
Three things I would love to see in Solang would include:
1. Versioning (as in F-spot)
2. RAW support (RAW + jpg)
3. export to UFRaw or similar and saving edited file back as version of original image.
These for me would speed up my workflow and ease navigation of my images in their various guises.
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