codeboje - coding and stuff - Tag imago

Imago now with AGPL

Even my previous plans with imago didn't work out i still did the step and released it under the AGPL and also offer a commercial license in case the AGPL isn't applicable for you. The terms of use of the previous 08 and 07 versions are not affected and you can still use them.

The code is hosted over at github -> Imago at github and i opened a support forum for test drive. Please use the github issue tracker for bug reports. I'll update the project site and docs when i get some time and muse for it :-)

The future of Imago

If you are a user of Imago you might already noticed that there hasn't been a new release for some month now. Frankly i do not spend much time improving it, neither do i really have the motivation. On the other site i've been thinking for while what i should do with Imago. Now i found a solution i feel comfortable with and you my fellow users are involved.

One day i stumpled over Kiva a platform for micro loans to poor people. I liked the idea of helping other through loans instead of simple donations. They need fundraising for their businesses and need to convince you to loan it. Imho a good way of helping people and i think people do value money more if they have to pay it back (banksters excluded of course, but we are talking here of average peoples :-) ). Go and check out yourself how it works. Maybe you are asking yourself right now, what has this all to do with Imago. Its pretty simple, i decided to make Imago open source but want a return for spending my time coding and supporting it. As i do not want any money for myself, but did like the idea of loaning, i make up this deal:

Join Team codeboje and loan money to the entrepreneur(s) of your choice in the name of the codeboje team and when the teams loaned money reachs the magical amount of 1000$ i'll release Imago under the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE v3. In no way i do earn any money with it and in the best way you get your loans back and didn't spend any money on my software.

Imago - Release v0.8

As mentioned earlier i present today Imago version 0.8 and also the updated Imago JAlbum skin.

Changes:

refactored xhtml structure;all generated xhtml, except the thumbs table, was removed in javascript and can now be specified in your xhtml file
updated to mootools 1.2.x and therefor it doesnt run with mootools 1.11 anymore
image prefetching is now always on for thumbnails and first main image

Download:
Imago v0.8

Whats next?:
I still need to update the docs and probably also the Picasa Exporter.

And a short reminder that theres an own feed for Imago news and releases now.

Upcoming release of Imago v08

I did redesign my photo gallery some time ago and therefor did refactore Imago - An AJAX Image gallery.

Changes:

refactored xhtml structure;all generated xhtml, except the thumbs table, was removed in javascript and can now be specified in your xhtml file
updated to mootools 1.2.x and therefor it doesnt run with mootools 1.11 anymore
image prefetching is now always on for thumbnails and first main image

My gallery already uses the new imago version. Seems to work well, but i still need to write some docs and redesign the imago site itself prior to release and hope to get it done soon.

Go check it out and c&c are always welcome :-)

And btw i created an own feed for Imago infos and it includes all blog post about Imago.

Review: Picoplog - A php Photoblog

Lately i got the idea of running a photoblog and was searching for an easy and simple solution with no complicated setup and a strong focus on the photo itself. And even to my own surprise i did find a great one, Picoplog.

But lets see what they say about themself:

Picoplog is a minimalistic photoblogging tool. Picoplog's major strength is its simplicity: posting a photo is done by just uploading it to your web space.

And yes, i think they are right. It's simple, needs no database, installs and runs with no hassles and also includes a simple uploader tool. The only bad thing is it's written in php, not python, but i can live with that :-)

I didn't test all the features as i am a purist in image presentation anyways, but what i used did work smoothly. Especially i like the way of uploading images and the uploader app they provide. Too bad the drag'n'drop in the uploader app didn't work really. I could drap'n'drop my image, but it didn't show up in the preview, neither could be uploaded. The same via "file open" did work perfectly. It's just in the supporting app, so its fine with me. Such things can happen.

Next step i took, was creating an own theme. And of course i'd like to integrate imago. Imago Theme for picoplog was born. The theme making was straight forward and not much more work then putting some php files in a folder and tell picoplog once which theme to use. Actually i fought more with php itself then figuring out how to write the theme.

Definitely worth a recommendation. Go check it out yourself and if you like the imago-picoplog combo, you can download my imago picoplog skin as zip file.

Imago Gallery running on Adobe AIR now

Imago runs on Adobe AIR now. You can now enjoy your galleries offline, too. If your impatient check out the screenshot and download ImagoOnAIR alpha version and the Adobe AIR runtime, if you don't have it already installed.

What’s Adobe AIR?

Adobe AIR is a runtime environment that lets you build desktop applications using Flash, Flex or plain HTML/Javascript. It runs on both Windows and OSX. Linux support will follow after Version 1.0 is released.

How to get started?

To build AIR applications you need 2 things to get started:

You might download the documentation and some of the examples too. Its pretty straight forward, at least for the Javascript/HTML apps. I recommend to take a look at the examples and read this nice tutorial over at 24ways. That should you get started as i'll focus more on my experiene of porting an existing Javascript/HMTL App to AIR.

How difficult was it to let Imago run under AIR?

For the first basic tests there was no need of changes at all. To my surprise. I expected some problems or code changes because of the XMLHttpRequest usage. But it worked and the AIR frameworks looked up the file on the file system. Nice. The only drawback is the way of air deployment. It didn't fit my idea of how to distribute the app first. I thought the air file would be some kind of executable and could be placed inside a gallery directory. But it isn't, its an installer file and the app gets really installed on the os. You should remember this when developing your own app!

With this knowledge i decided that Imago should act more like an app and adjust to the framework. Reading local files and loading a galery.xml and the whole gallery was straight forward, again. But i had to adjust the Imago loading mechanism a bit to run under the AIR Security model, i.e. the use of eval after loading the app is restricted. Otherwise this was the only real change caused by the air framework. All other changes were related to the migration from a "see it on one web site app" to a full desktop variante.

Conclusion

AIR is a nice piece of technology and its a simple way for bringing webapps to the desktop. For the app it behaves like a browser with additional access to the local machine. No worries about installation and deployment issues. And the one time footprint of a ~11MB download for the runtime is IMHO ok. Sure if you just want to run Imago or another small app, you get alot of overhead as with almost all frameworks or runtime environments. Buts that pretty normal developer choice.

For now i wouldn't code a bigger Javascript/HTML project with AIR as the debugging is bad. Theres no debugger and you have to relay on simple trace prints. And no hot deplyoment. I had to restart the app everytime i made a change to the script. Hopefully they add it later as i think the runtime has some potential. Then again its just beta3 :-)

New Software: MooSmug

If you haven't noticed a new lib named MooSmug is available. It provides access to the smugmug api in a similar way as MooPix does for flickr. Check MooSmug out or take a look at the new Imago demo using MooSmug.

Imago-An-Ajax-Image-Gallery-Release-Version-04

A major rework under the hood and 3 visible enhancements. First Imago can prefetch the images now. Second i added a new way of loading galleries and one can now write some kind of plugins for loading different "config files styles". And last but not least i implemented a DemoLoader for Flickr without any serverside scripting (using MooPix).

For a quick view:

Imago Sample Gallery
Imago Sample Gallery with Flickr Integration using FlickrViewer
Imago Sample Gallery with Flickr Integration using MooPix

Whats new?
image prefetching; none, thumbs and all ; the prefetching is still under development so use it with caution.
Plugable GalleryLoaders
a first demo flickr loader, loads recents flickr images and can be used as basis to extend
the configuration changed, for further infos see the imago main page

Where to get?
download Imago

Bugreports & Suggestions:
As always, just drop a comment or write a mail to support [at] codeboje [dot] de.

Imago - An Ajax Image Gallery - Release Version 03c

A minor enhancement release with changing the url handling to use the thumbPath and imagePath of gallery.xml. Therefor its more compatible now with SimpleViewer and you can use FlickrViewer to build the gallery.xml from your flickr photosets.

I know its not server independant anymore when you want to use the flickr integration, but currently it was the easiest way. I did take a look on how i could integrate flickr into imago with pure javascript, but wasn't satiesfied with it. The whole configuration is public and thus the api key. Anyways i am not a flickr user, but if theres a further demand of a pure javascript integration you should take a look at our support/donation page.

For a quick view:
Imago Sample Gallery
Imago Sample Gallery with Flickr Integration using FlickrViewer

Whats new?
- changed url handling
- supports FlickrViewer now, just drop the flickrViewer.php where normally your gallery.xml would reside and configure it, add a this.galleryFileName = 'flickrViewer.php'; in your gallery config

Where to get?
download Imago

Bugreports & Suggestions:
As always, just drop a comment or write a mail to support [at] codeboje [dot] de.

Imago - An Ajax Image Gallery - New supporting Tool

Recently i had the need of just putting the images in one directory into a Imago Image Gallery without using Picasa and caring about an image title. As i am a new fan of python, i hacked a script together that does the job. The script can be downloaded :Directory2Imago Image Gallery Script. If you only want to use the script you might skip here as i am now talking a bit of how i did it. So if your curious go ahead reading :-)

How does it work?
The script iterates over any file in a given directory and if its an image, it generate a thumbnail for it and adds it to the gallery.xml file. In the end we got an folder for uploading to a image gallery folder.

Any modules needed?
I am using PIL for generating the thumbnails. Anything else should be already in your python installation.

The important code part
I guess you already downloaded the script. The whole beginning is just parsing the options with getopts. If you are not familiar with it i recommend you take a look at getopt doc.

The main method is "create" as seen below. First we create or gallery directory and the 2 need subdirs for the thumbmnails and the images. Thereafter we iterate over each file in the given input dir and try to open it with PIL. If that fails, its no image file or at least none that PIL can handle. We ignore this error and continue with the next one. If its a valid image file we check if its landscape or portrait and calculate the size for the thumb, keeping the original aspect ratio. Then we thumbnail it with the best available algorithm and save it in the thumbnails folder. Now we copy the original image to the gallery image folder and add it to our gallery definition. At the end we save it to a gallery.xml file as UTF-8.

def create(self):
    self.__destinationDir += self.__galleryName
    if not os.path.exists(self.__destinationDir):
        os.mkdir(self.__destinationDir)
        os.mkdir(self.__destinationDir + "/thumbnails")
        os.mkdir(self.__destinationDir + "/images")
    for fileName in os.listdir (self.__indir):
        fileStats = os.stat ( self.__indir + fileName )
        if not stat.S_ISDIR ( fileStats [ stat.ST_MODE ] ):
            try:
                originalImage = Image.open(self.__indir + fileName)
                width, height = originalImage.size
                if (width > height):
                    size= self.__maxWidth, (height/(width/self.__maxWidth))
                else:
                    size= (width/(height/self.__maxHeight)), self.__maxHeight
                originalImage.thumbnail(size, Image.ANTIALIAS)
                originalImage.save(self.__destinationDir + "/thumbnails/" + fileName, "JPEG")
                shutil.copyfile(self.__indir + fileName,self.__destinationDir +"/images/" + fileName)
                self.__output += '<image><filename>' + fileName + '</filename><caption></caption></image>'
            except IOError:
                pass
    galleryXML = file(self.__destinationDir + '/gallery.xml', 'w')
    galleryXML.write((self.__xmlInfo + "\n" + self.__galleryStartPart1 + self.__galleryName + self.__galleryStartPart2 + "\n" + self.__output + "\n</simpleviewerGallery>").encode('utf-8'))
    galleryXML.close()

If you made some improvements, consider dropping us a note.

Imago - An Ajax Image Gallery - Bugfix-Release Version 03b

Version 0.3b is out with some bug fixes and switch to mootools 1.11

For a quick view:
Imago Sample Gallery

Whats new?
-switched to mootools 1.11
- supports empty captions now
- fixed bug "image does not load when clicked on selected image in thumbMenu twice"; see mootools forum
- removed console.log, so no javascript errors should appear now

Where to get?
download Imago

Bugreports & Suggestions:
As always, just drop a comment or write a mail to info at codeboje dot de.

Imago - An Ajax Image Gallery - Bugfix-Release Version 03a

Version 0.3a is out with 2 bug fixes for the thumbMenu.

For a quick view:
Imago Sample Gallery

Whats new?
- fixed 2 bugs when gallery length matched the max imagesPerThumbMenu

Where to get?
download Imago

Bugreports & Suggestions:
As always, just drop a comment or write a mail to info [at] codeboje [dot] de.

Imago Exporter for Picasa available

As i am using it myself, i thought it could be useful for others. If your using picasa and imago, just grap the download and unpack the web template in (picasa inst)webtemplates , (re)start Picasa and use the new exporter.

Where to get?
download Imago Picasa Exporter

Bugreports & Suggestions:
As always, just drop a comment or write a mail to info [at] codeboje [dot] de.

Imago - An Ajax Image Gallery - Release Version 03

Update: This version is outdated. For current infos check imago product page.

Version 0.3 is out with a bug fix and a smaller change. Image loading is fixed now and the menu navigation got a bit better. I also set up a product page for it.

For a quick view:
Imago Sample Gallery

Whats new?
- fixed image switching bug due delayed loading
- Hide Next Button when there are no more image and hide previos button when on first menu page

Where to get?
see update info.

Bugreports & Suggestions:
As always, just drop a comment or write a mail to info [at] codeboje [dot] de.

Imago - Ajax Image Gallery - New release

Hooray, i present you a new release of Imago, an Ajax Image Gallery.

For a quick view:
Imago Sample Gallery

UPDATE:

a new version is available Imago Release 03

Whats new?

switched to mootools v1
new thumbnailMenu with a table
use gallery.xml thumbnailColumns and thumbnailRows for building the thumbnailMenu
navigation for thumbnailMenu
changed layout and id/class naming
2 styles of gallery finding
License changed

Where to get?
download Imago

Explanation of changed features
if you specify an albumName, eg Madeira, Imago will look for the gallery.xml and images with the path /gallery/, if you use an empty "" albumName, it looks in the same directory as your gallery page is located.

Terms of Use
Imago may be used in any kinds of personal and/or commercial projects.
Redistributed or reselling to other companies or third parties is prohibited.
Please ensure that the Imago download link is clearly visible. By default in the top right corner.

Bugreports & Suggestions:
As always, just drop a comment or write a mail to info [at] codeboje [dot] de.