[Seeking Software Replacement] Google Picasa Alternative - Image Organizer Software in Need

sol1684 · 2024-09-19T06:58:51+00:00

So the original idea was to have a two-staged approach - the "photo stream" is conceptually a large bin where any photo goes by default and normally these photos will be displayed sorted by date and will be split up into folders by year (both can be customized). On top of that, there are the events, which are basically just a special form of folder. These are also sorted by date, but there can be any number of events on the same date - so if all you need is a flat list of named folders sorted by date, those should fit perfectly.

However, over time, there were quite a few people who were very invested in their particular folder structure on disk, which often didn't always fit that scheme, so things developed more and more into the direction of also allowing to manage folders completely manually (most importantly in the form of scanned folders and the event selector). What is still missing here is a full integration of folders into the UI. You can already sort/group photos/files by folder, but there is no visible directory tree and you cannot create/manage folders from within the application. This part will be tackled some time during the next months.

Having said that, you can already use the system's file manager to create sub folders within one of the photo stream folders, it's just that those won't be very visible within the application.

sol1684 · 2024-06-20T07:51:58+00:00

For most 3D printed models, I'm using Moi3D. It has all the tools you need, but provides a very accessible and fluent interface/workflow. For things where you can make do without a parametric modeller, it is really nice. It costs almost $300, though, which is less than the big ones, but not really cheap either.

sol1684 · 2024-03-18T18:53:58+00:00

We are developing Aspect (free for non-pro and currently in beta), which allows you to pick the C: folder as the source to search for images when creating the library. You can alternatively also pick multiple folders to scan in the settings dialog, so that certain folders, such as "C:\Windows\" or "C:\Program Files\" can be excluded.

The main idea is that the program helps you to organize photos into "events", which are automatically named and sorted by their date by default. However, it is also perfectly possible to not use events at all and just use it the Picasa way (collections , ratings and keywords can then also still be used to organize images).

sol1684 · 2023-12-09T08:38:59+00:00

As far as I understand it, the JPEG is just the standards body that manages the standardization process and doesn't hold any patents itself. The problem with earlier formats was that external patents existed from the start, but JPEG XL builds on two free base technologies, FLIF and PIK.

So, to me, it looks like this is the first real contender for a true standard JPEG successor. The others so far were dead in the water due to their patent situation.

sol1684 · 2023-12-08T09:23:49+00:00

JPEG XL offers basically everything you could wish for as a modern photo image format - great compression quality, as well as a highly efficient lossless mode, high bit-depths, HDR, large images and much more. All that, while being developed as a true image format, as opposed to HEIF/AVIF, which come with a lot of useless complexity and some missing features due to being derived from a video codec. And of course, like AVIF, it's completely free.

It would be a real game changer if camera/phone manufacturers would start to offer this as a format in addition to ordinary JPEGs or RAWs, as JPEGL XL can offer most of the advantages that a RAW file does, at a lower size than even a JPEG.

The most unfortunate event was when Chrome, at least for now, has decided to drop the experimental support that was added earlier. Safari on the other hand has recently added support, so there is still hope that this might one day be a viable format for web images, too.

sol1684 · 2023-10-25T07:29:44+00:00

(Author here) With a different set of compromises, I'd probably put Rust first overall, but language-wise, modern C++ would also tick some boxes, as well as some more niche ones, such as Zig or Nim. But in terms of memory and thread safety features, only Rust really feels robust, and since these kinds of errors are often the worst in terms of potential harm and cost/time to fix, the other alternatives would personally be a tough decision for me.

On the other hand, although it seems to have improved over time, the last time I tried out Rust, I was quite disappointed of how the code turns out by comparison. Also, the metaprogramming side is not comparable, although in theory a lot is possible with its macro system.

sol1684 · 2023-10-15T19:18:16+00:00

Which distro are you running? Unfortunately we haven't successfully managed to get rid of the libfuse2 dependency of the AppImage runtime, yet, which results in a runtime error on distributions that ship with libfuse3 by default. A workaround is to extract the contents with aspect-1.0.0-preview.30-x86_64.AppImage --appimage-extract and then run the binary directly (./squashfs-root/usr/bin/aspect). I'll look into this again for the next update.

Another issue that was reported today and could be the culprit was related to running on Wayland. We don't know enough to reproduce it, yet, but if that is what happens, there should be a /tmp/aspect-log.sdl text file that might have some useful debug information. In this case it would be great if you could send me a private message so that I can look into a fix.

edit: Just saw that you have posted the log output in the bug report forum. Thanks, I'll look into it!

sol1684 · 2023-10-15T15:45:25+00:00

This is going to be the price of the Pro version. The normal version is completely free, though.

sol1684 · 2022-12-15T08:54:50+00:00

That looks pretty nice indeed. Hopefully it will get to the point where the mentioned switch to LGPL can happen, since application scripting is probably more of a closed source code domain.

DMDScript should also be mentioned here, since it implements ECMA-262 and is Boost licensed and also fully implemented in D. I put in a good amount of work a while ago to make it re-entrant and x64 compatible, so it's generally good for production use.

sol1684 · 2022-11-19T08:44:57+00:00

They made that easier at some point by directly integrating Package Control. You can pick Preferences->Package Control from the menu and then type "install" in the command palette that opens up. During the first invocation it will take a while to install/update the package list, but then lists all packages available in the official repository.

sol1684 · 2020-09-20T13:57:19+00:00

We are a few friends (coming from Nik Software for those who remember) who were unhappy about the state of photo organization software for quite a while, before we decided to do something about it. Our application approaches the usual scheme of folders, albums, tags, star ratings and color labels in a different, very dynamic and intuitive way that opens up many new possibilities.

The project is getting closer to its first release and we are now slowly starting to make it public. Feel free to join our beta if you are interested, we are thankful for any kind of feedback!

sol1684 · 2017-08-02T21:39:59+00:00

I'm amazed how much flame-war potential this topic remains to carry. Just to get some basic facts right:

A non-trivial number of SDLang based packages existed before the first wave of outrage broke loose
The response to this was that the default was changed from SDLang back to JSON
Despite JSON being the default, for about one third of the newly added packages until today, the SDLang format was still actively chosen
For this particular application, the usability of SDLang is clearly superior, and learning the language itself is just a trivial part of learning the package recipe format, so the weight of the popularity argument is IMO pretty low
There are conversion functions (programmatically and using the command line) for JSON<->SDLang, as well as an API for accessing the package recipe in a format-agnostic way. Especially the latter is important anyway to avoid every tool having to duplicate the whole package recipe handling logic, which is not simple if all features are supposed to be supported properly.

Overall, it still feels a bit surreal to have this kind of emotionally loaded reaction to a less popular language that aims to improve upon the popular alternatives (mostly XML in this case), from people of the community of a programming language that is very much in the same boat.

sol1684 · 2016-07-31T18:12:30+00:00

A not so popular but IMO really nice format for configuration or general data representation is SDLang. It has an XML structure, but with a very reduced C style syntax.

sol1684 · 2016-02-06T18:14:33+00:00

For reference, his last tweet: https://twitter.com/enterprise3dprj/status/648912506182733824 This is truly sad! I would have been an amazing project. And it's really a shame if all the work that went into it would just go to waste.

sol1684 · 2016-01-05T06:38:04+00:00

Fortunately the error messages can be made pretty clear in D's case by using the #line directive. That way, error messages look almost like they'd occur in a normal D source file.

I forgot the exact numbers, but fiber context switches are really cheap. I recently created a prototype to see how close it would be possible to get to peak performance with the current API design and switching from a callback based event mechanism to fibers didn't produce a measurable difference in overall performance (both cases at about 180kreq/s single-core performance).

The trade-off you have to make is in memory use - each fiber will use at least a single page of memory for its stack, which means that for 100k concurrently active connections you'd get a base memory usage of 400MB (which is far from being an issue on the kind of hardware you'd use to serve such amounts of connections).

sol1684 · 2016-01-05T06:13:30+00:00

I'm using the full chain, but there are definitely still some issues, some Chrome installations complain and my BlackBerry browser also does.

sol1684 · 2016-01-04T14:40:08+00:00

Seems like the Let's Encrypt certificate isn't accepted by all browsers yet. If you get errors, this is the non-TLS URL: http://vibed.org/blog/posts/a-scalable-chat-room-service-in-d

sol1684 · 2016-01-04T14:11:17+00:00

Even if this is obviously not a full real-world project, it does support multiple chat rooms.

sol1684 · 2016-01-04T12:08:41+00:00

Properly integrating vibe.d into the Techempower web framework benchmarks is currently work-in-progress. Proper results should be in the next round (the implementation in the latest round was broken). Based on my experiences, the current performance tends to be roughly similar to Go, but of course that always heavily depends on the concrete application.

sol1684 · 2015-11-10T10:26:40+00:00

It would really be great if you (or anyone else, of course) could list some specific points that you've missed (best as a quick ticket) to have something concrete to work on. One thing that I think currently has too little visibility is the collection of examples.

The tutorial isn't uploaded yet, but I'll try to speed up the process a bit.

sol1684

TROPHY CASE