Cat-Photo / News: Recent posts

The third version of the file format specification has been released. Without breaking backwards compatibility, it has been simplified a lot. One important field has been removed though: The Group field in the [Global] section. This information has basically been moved to the cpdir.txt file, and if anybody finds that this is causing trouble, don't hesitate to contact me, and I will write a tool that converts from the old 2.0 version to this new version.

It seems that the public CVS repository access doesn't show the newest files. I support request has been made to SourceForge, and we hope that the matter is solved in short time.

The first version of the python tool has been released - see how it looks like here: http://billeder.dybdahl.dk/

WinPhoto is a program to handle textual information with jpeg images in a way that makes it easy to handle and ensure a long lifetime for the information stored. This new version is a monolithic version, which means it should work with wine under Linux, and it is translated to English, Danish and Russian.

A bug was found in version 1.4.0, that made WinPhoto generate not so nice html output. But additionally, a few improvements were made:

- Installation program now offers to autoregister jpg extension
- Added uninstall feature to installation program

WinPhoto 1.4 is a program to attach information to pictures, show them in a slideshow and make webpages where the information is included. The information that digital cameras store in jpeg files about the shoot, like date and time, camera model etc., is also extracted and included in the webpage.

This version mainly improves usability of the software.

A primitive java program to edit text information on pictures has been released. Go into the files section to download it.

Lars Dybdahl.

Version 1.3.1 features automatic gamma correction from exif jpeg files to web friendly jpeg. Basically this means that your digital camera photos will look much better with this software than if you used other software to publish it.

A new version of the php publishing package has been released. It now installs in /usr/local/cat-photo/php and provides dramatically easier usage.

It has never been so easy to publish jpg pictures and associated information on a webserver.

Lars Dybdahl.

The PHP version has been improved a lot. It now supports the latest PHP version (4.2.x), generates UTF-8 output and the new HOWTO file says the rest:

In order to publish your photos, do this:

- Copy genpics, cat-photo.php and index.php into your image directory.
- Copy the images/ subdirectory, too.
- From a konsole, with the image directory as current directory, run ./genpics

That's it. You can view the web pages when you have uploaded all the files
to a webserver that supports php.

LinPhoto has made it's first release. It contains cp2xml, exif2cp and cpmodify. It's not much and there is no GUI program, but it works. Use the PHP publishing toolkit to publish on Linux.

Several people have asked me to publish the current state of the CVS code as a release. This release has become version 1.3.2.

WinPhoto 1.3 has been released. It is improved in many ways and could deserve a "2.0" version number.

The changelog and release notes are included in the program, as well as published in the files section here at sourceforge.

Lars Dybdahl

The WinPhoto Exif import functionality has now been separated into a command line tool. The current version is 0.9, because the command line interface still isn't mature.

The tool is named Exif2CP and is located in the cvs under /home/cvs/cat-photo/exif2cp.

Lars Dybdahl.

XML is not well-suited for the cat-photo file format, but if you want XML, you can now find a tool in the CVS source-code under cat-photo/cp2xml, that outputs XML data from the data in a directory.

CP2XML is a command line tool and very easy to use.

Lars Dybdahl.

Version 2.0 of the cat-photo specification has been released. It is still 100% compatible with all other versions back to version 1.0, but it now adds directory information, that will make it possible to automate HTML generation, cataloguing, searches, index etc., on multiple (many!) directories.

Version 2.0 is already supported in WinPhoto 1.2.99 beta 11.

Borland has released details about Kylix at http://www.inprise.com/kylix/. It looks very promising, and the original estimate to deliver a Linux version of WinPhoto march 2001 still looks realistic.

The Windows program code-named Cat-Photo-Win now has a name: WinPhoto.

Lars.

Version 1.1.0 has a new, improved layout, and supports the upcoming version 2.0 of the cat-photo file specifications.

Since all versions are compatible with the same file format, there is no technical reason to upgrade, but the layout has truly improved a lot.

As you can see, there is now some source-code in the CVS tree at SourceForge. This is old source-code!! I made the guys at SF put up the snapshot of my CVS tree, but it took a lot of time, and I still hasn't got the correct access to the SF CVS server, so development will continue to be done at the previous cvs server.

Beta 7 has been released, but new beta-versions will no longer be announced here - only in the e-mail list at eGroups:

http://www.egroups.com/group/cat-photo

Lars.

Beta 6 fixes a serious bug reported by the SourceForge bug system: Data was not saved in the main form... I had prepared the source-code to become easier to port to Linux, and did not do that well.

Beta 6 has a nicer buttons, but is otherwise the same as beta 5.

Lars.

Shortly after the beta 4 release, beta 5 is out. Many more Exif tags are read from the jpeg files, maybe 4 times as many. Additionally, a "view text file" menu entry has been introduced. The rest is the same as beta 4.

The major difference between beta 5 and version 1.3 final are the icons in the toolbar and menus.

Beta 4 provides image rotation/orientation capabilities. If the camera doesn't auto-rotate the images, or does it wrong, you can now specify the image orientation and have it published correctly.

Beta 3 has now been released. It comes closer and closer to a version 1.3 release, but unfortunately I will not have much time to work on it the next week or two.

Beta 3 has a few nag fixes and some usability enhancement. It includes a pre-release of the next Cat-Photo 1.6 standard, that includes support for orientation of pictures. The idea is, that the HTML generator software will rotate the pictures automatically, and the the Windows tool will display the pictures in the correct orientation, without modifying the original files. That is very important, because a JPEG file cannot be rotated without quality loss, and Exif tags would probably get lost.... read more