Shallow Thoughts : tags : image viewer

Pho 1.0, Belated Release

I was doing some disk housekeeping and noticed that my venerable image viewer, Pho, was at version 1.0pre1, and had been since 2017. It's had only very minimal changes since that time. I guess maybe it's been long enough that it's time to remove that -pre1 moniker, huh?

Of course I couldn't leave it at that. There were a couple of very minor bugs I'd been ignoring, when you delete from the end or beginning of the image list. So I fixed those, bumped the version, updated the web page, tagged the git tree and made a release. Pho is now 1.0. About time!

Tags: programming, pho, image viewer
[ 10:32 Sep 26, 2020    More programming | permalink to this entry | ]

New project: Metapho image tagger

I'm excited about my new project: MetaPho, an image tagger.

It arose out of a discussion on the LinuxChix Techtalk list: photo collection management software. John Sturdy was looking for an efficient way of viewing and tagging large collections of photos. Like me, he likes fast, lightweight, keyboard-driven programs. And like me, he didn't want a database-driven system that ties you forever to one image cataloging program. I put my image tags in plaintext files, named Keywords, so that I can easily write scripts to search or modify them, or user grep, and I can even make quick changes with a text editor.

I shared some tips on how I use my Pho image viewer for tagging images, and it sounded close to what he was looking for. But as we discussed ideas about image tagging, we realized that there were things he wanted to do that pho doesn't do well, things not offered by any other image tagger we've been able to find. While discussing how we might add new tagging functionality to pho, I increasingly had the feeling that I was trying to fit off-road tires onto a Miata -- or insert your own favorite metaphor for "making something do something it wasn't designed to do."

Pho is a great image viewer, but the more I patched it to handle tagging, the uglier and more complicated the code got, and it also got more complex to use.

And really, everything we needed for tagging could be easily done in a Python-GTK application. (Pho is written in C because it does a lot of complicated focus management to deal with how window managers handle window moving and resizing. A tagger wouldn't need any of that.)

I whipped up a demo image viewer in a few hours and showed it to John. We continued the discussion, I made a GitHub repo, and over the next week or so the code grew into an efficient and already surprisingly usable image tagger.

We have big plans for it, like tags organized into categories so we can have lots of tags without cluttering the interface too much. But really, even as it is, it's better than anything I've used before. I've been scanning in lots of photos from old family albums (like this one of my mother and grandmother, and me at 9 months) and it's been great to be able to add and review tags easily.

If you want to check out MetaPho, or contribute to it (either code or user interface design), it lives in my MetaPho repository on GitHub. And I wrote up a quick man page in markdown format: metapho.1.md.

Feedback and contributors welcome!

Tags: programming, pho, image viewer, python, tagging, metapho
[ 19:31 Feb 21, 2013    More programming | permalink to this entry | ]

Pho 0.9.8 released

I decided to give myself a birthday present and release version 0.9.8 of Pho, my image viewer, at long last.

I've been using it essentially unchanged for many months now, occasionally tweaking things or fixing minor bugs ... but I haven't run into any bugs in quite a while, and think I've fixed all the pending ones. Been meaning to make a release for a long time, but somehow I keep getting sidetracked and forgetting about it.

This should rationalize the version number again ... the official releases have been 0.9.7-preN forever, but there was an unofficial 0.9.7 and even a 0.9.8 that snuck in along with some patches I got from David Gardner. It's been confusing. So now it's officially 0.9.8, and any figure versions will start with 0.9.9, and we might even see a 1.0 one of these days. (I suppose it's time -- Pho is ten years old!)

So here it is: Pho 0.9.8. I think it's working well. If you're already a Pho user, or if you want a lightweight image viewer that's also good at triaging and annotating large batches of images, you might want to take a look.

Tags: programming, pho, image viewer
[ 13:36 Sep 05, 2012    More programming | permalink to this entry | ]

Pho 0.9.6 finally released!

Pho 0.9.6-pre3 has been working great for me for about a month, and I've been trying to find the time to do a release. I finally managed it this weekend, after making a final tweak to change the default PHO_REMOTE command from gimp-remote to gimp since gimp-remote is obsolete and is no longer built by default.

The big changes from 0.9.5 are Keywords mode, slideshow mode, the new PHO_REMOTE environment variable, swapping -f and -F, and a bunch of performance work and minor bug fixing.

I built deb packages for Ubuntu (Hardy, but they should work on Intrepid too) and Debian (Etch), as well as the usual source tarball, and they're available at the usual place:

http://shallowsky.com/software/pho.

Tags: programming, pho, image viewer
[ 18:11 Nov 09, 2008    More programming | permalink to this entry | ]

New Pho 0.9.6-pre3

I've released Pho 0.9.6-pre3. The only change is to fix a sporadic bug where pho would sometimes jump back to the first image after deleting the last one, rather than backing up to the next-to-last image. I was never able to reproduce the bug reliably, but I cleaned up the image list next/prev code quite a bit and haven't seen the bug since then. I'd appreciate having a few testers exercising this code as much as possible.

Otherwise pho is looking pretty solid for a 0.9.6 release.

Tags: programming, pho, image viewer
[ 10:57 Oct 02, 2008    More programming | permalink to this entry | ]