Last friday night (October 12th) we released the new alpha version 0.2.30 of Pictomio (together with our new website).

Latest Changes:

• Improved user interface layout
  Most noticable for users who have used an older version of Pictomio before will be the new arrangement of UI-controls. For example we placed the grouping and sorting options of the thumbnail view together in one line with the path control box which saves vertical screen space while looking very tidy at the same time. We also rearranged nearly all controls in the zoom view and added a new menu bar for operations that operate on the currently displayed image. After an intensive discussion we removed the old smiley-rating system and just kept the five-star rating control. Since I liked the smiley rating I was not very happy with this decision - if you have an opinion on this point please let us know in the forum.
• Tagging support
  An arbitrary number of tags can be attached to individual pixel positions or to an image as whole. To add tags to an image click on the tag button in the Zoom-view (the big view of an image where you can use the mouse-wheel to zoom into an image).
• Search functionality
  You can now enter search terms in the search box at the top right of the Pictomio main window. The text you enter is searched in several attributes of the image files, e.g. filename, tags, categories, albums, description etc. Please note that it is currently only possible to search for the beginning of texts. The Pictomio database has not yet a full text index that would allow to search for individual words in the middle of image descriptions. We are currently discussing when we should invest time to add such a feature.
• Video & audio-playback
  Simple video and audio-files can now be played in the zoom-view and in the carrousel view (even with the mirror-effect on the virtual floor). Play, stop, pause, fast-forward and backwards buttons are shown when a video is loaded - since our Designer (Alex) was busy with our new website we simply took the first button design from the slideshow buttons... Alex will create a better fitting button style for the next version. The video-playback code is still very experimental and will need some more stabilization and clean-up...
• Browse database by image information (EXIF value)
  You can now browse for images by their EXIF meta tags in the Library. For example you can easily select all images that where taken with a certain camera model or at a certain shutter speed. This feature would definitely not be possible without an underlying database engine. It is quite hard to describe this feature - just download the latest alpha version an try it yourself (you have to select the library tab above the tree view).
• Image information collapsible window (on the right side)
  On the right side of the Pictomio main window we added a new collapsible window that shows the most important information about an image and lets you consistently change rating, annotation, categories and global image tags from one central place in the application - it can be used for all view-modes but the carrousel view (we will fix this later).
• Create albums and sub-albums
  The main internal difference between albums and categories in Pictomio is the fact that albums can be nested, that means an album can have sub-albums. In the latest version you can use the "Add Folder" button when an album is selected in the library tree view to add a sub-album.
• Options support
  It is now possible to change the language of the user interface in the options dialog box and turn off several features of the carrousel view (to make it more usable for older graphics cards). Currently the language change requires a manual restart of Pictomio but we will likely add an automatic reinitialize function soon. Internally the option system has been developed as an easily extensible service which allows us to provide quickly more options in the future. BTW: Options are stored in the Pictomio settings data base (Settings.pvdb).
• Soft-Scrolling in thumbnail view
  When you use the scroll-bar or the mouse-wheel to scroll the thumbnail view (in grid or filmstrip mode) a scrolling is now much smoother than in most other applications. There is currently a known problem of the thumbnails frame that it is sometimes intially positioned at a wrong offset - we will fix this next week.
• Start external applications to edit an image ("Open with..." like Windows Explorer)
  You can now start your image editing programms that are registered for its file-type. Click with the right mouse button on an image and select "Open with..." from the context-menu that appears.
• Work on the internal Database maintenance operations has been started
  Pictomio stores a lot of information about images in the database. Of course there have to be some maintenance functions that remove information of missing files and detects changes of files. But Pictomio will be able to do more than most other image browsers: It will be able to detect that files moved or copied with other tools (e.g. the Windows Explorer) are the original file. Internally Pictomio distinguishes between image files stored on transport media and on archive media. UI elements to change the type of a media will be added in the next version. I will write then a more detailled description on how they work.

Known Issues:

• Under certain conditions Pictomio does not exit. Please use the Windows Task Manger to kill such zombie processes (they are harmless). This is a top-priority bug that will be analyzed next week...

Andreas
Pictomio Lead Developer