If you’re searching for an open source photo organizer alphabetically, the last one you’d consider is Zoph. But if you’re looking for features, maybe you ought to push it up closer to the top of your list.
That’s just how Jeroen Roos found Zoph, whose name comes from Zoph Organizes PHotos. “When I bought my first digital camera, I figured that I would need a program to store my photos and keep them organized or else I would end up with hundreds of directories full of photos, where I would never be able to find a particular photo. I made a list of about 30 or so such programs and looked at every one of them, but none of them was what I was looking for. I was ready to give up, until I looked at the last one – Zoph.”
Now Roos maintains the project’s code – and the story of how he reached that position is an instructive one for anyone who wonders how to become a valued contributor on a project. “I started using Zoph five years ago, and really liked it. At that time, Zoph was maintained by Jason Geiger, who started the project. At some point I mailed Jason a patch and mentioned that it would be nice if Zoph could be styled using CSS. He agreed to let me work on that. By the time I had it ready a year later, Jason’s focus had moved away from Zoph and he asked me if I wanted to maintain it.” Roos released the latest version of the software earlier this month.
Unlike many such utilities, Zoph focuses on keeping track of your entire photo collection. Most similar programs focus on showing the photos to other people, which may cause you to store only a subset of your photos – only the best, the ones you want to show to others – in the program.
One interesting feature in Zoph lets you customize the cover page for an album, category, person, or place using Zophcode, which is similar to the BBCode used in phpBB forums. For the next upcoming version Roos says he is working on a complete rewrite of the import functionality. “Most of the support requests are about the web import feature. It’s not really convenient to upload a large amount of photos with the current one. I am also planning on some improvements on the mapping integration, including geotagging.”
Roos writes most of his code with vi, and tests it in Firefox with the Firebug add-on. But right now he’s a one-man shop. “What I miss most during working on Zoph is a ‘sparring partner’ with whom I can discuss design decisions. I am not a developer in daily life (I am a networking consultant) so I don’t always have the experience to make those decisions.” If you’d like to get involved with Zoph development, you should post on the Zoph forum.
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