Picture Show / News: Recent posts

The -nosubs command-line argument is now parsed before traversing folders for image files (had been parsed afterwards, making it ineffective). Note that this option must be chosen in the Select window by clearing the checkbox before adding folders to view via the folder dialog, as a new balloon tip says.
Fixed a memory leak that caused out-of-memory crash.
Timer is now stopped when an error occurs during display, to prevent repeat of error message.
Test and warning message added for invalid command-argument keywords.
Improved and documented command-line options; see the readme.txt file, or app-startup source code.
Various internal changes, and some procedures renamed.

The major change from version 9.4 to 10.3 is the option to sort all selected images by date. Previously the only alternatives were by file name within each folder selected (the default) or randomly. The date used is the Exif date-taken field, or if it is missing then the file's last-modified date. This option requires reading every file at the start of the program. On my system it passes about 8 files a second; results will vary depending on several external factors. If more than 100 files are selected, the program displays a progress window to show that it's running; less than 100, you have to have faith, though the threshold can be changed in the source code.... read more

The big news is that a dissolve feature is now available in release 9.4. This required a major rewrite and efficiency review, since 2 images are being rendered with varying opacity 10 times a second during the fade, instead of one every 4 or more seconds.

PicShow supports shortcuts to image files now.

And I deleted my Exif-data-reader class when I moved to VB 2010; instead I use built-in methods and select one of these:
- 270, x'010E - Image title/description; ASCII; highest priority
- 40092, x'9C9C - Windows Explorer comment
- 37510, x'9286 - Exif UserComment: ASCII, Unicode, other, but delivered to user as Unicode regardless; lowest priority... read more

Version 5.0 (still being tested, not yet uploaded) displays images pointed to by Windows shortcuts (.lnk files). For example, if you have a folder for a slide show of "barns" and another of "rural Montana", you don't need to duplicate an image of a Montana barn in both places; just put a shortcut in one folder to the actual file in the other. PicShow verifies that the target file of the link exists and is an image file type before adding it to the list of images to be displayed.

A JPEG file's Exif UserComment field (tag 37510 or H.9286) can be in ASCII or Unicode. The current version now supports both (though not JIS or "undefined" character codes). But - small gotcha - if the Exif ImageDescription field (which must be ASCII) (tag 270 or H.10E) is present, it will take precedence over UserComment in the display.

A new version of PicShow is available. Earlier versions accepted command-line arguments to specify folder(s) with images to be displayed and options such as whether to show each image file's name, path, date taken, and Exif comments. But Windows shortcut files are limited to 256 bytes of such information, and with multiple fully-qualified folder paths it was easy to exceed that limit and have the arguments truncated. Version 4.3 allows the alternative of specifying a single argument consisting of the fully qualified path, name, and filetype of a .picshow file. If that is specified the program will look solely to the file for startup information. Previous alternatives of specifying command arguments, or of specifying none and displaying a dialog box for selecting a single folder to show images from, are unchanged. The .picshow file can contain arguments separated by spaces or for ease of reading on separate lines. Options like -showdate and -showcomment can be followed by commas as in olden days or not; the commas are ignored. If you want, you can use Explorer to associate the .picshow file type with PicShow, so double-clicking on a file brings up the program and displays the images specified.

PicShow has been rewritten in VB 2005 to use the facilities of the .NET 2 framework. It now displays JPEG/JPG, TIFF/TIF, PNG, GIF, BMP, and WMF files, expanded without distortion to the full height and/or width of a 3:4 aspect ratio monitor screen, which is reset to 1600 x 1200 resolution. It optionally shows (besides the file name and DatePictureTaken Exif tag #36867) the Exif ImageDescription tag #270 or if that is absent the UserComment tag #37510. Numerous changes to improve robustness and the handling of files that use either big-endian or little-endian numeric format have been incorporated. Each selected image file is read into a byte array, so all subsequent processing takes place in memory. Multiple discontiguous folders with images may now be specified on the command line, along with options to display file name, path, date picture taken, and Exif comment (tags 270 and 37510); if a folder contains no images, a message is displayed, and if no folders contain any images to display the application terminates with an error message. ... read more