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.