To PostGIS Or Not To PostGIS, that is the question...

Development of Photo Organizer has slowed down lately, in part thanks to RealLife(tm) getting in the way, but mostly due to the remaining feature requests becoming increasingly more invasive. This isn't to say that these features aren't a good idea, but rather that due to PO's craptastic code structure, a seemingly "minor feature" would require a major internal overhaul.

Features like replacing the internal permission model with a finer-grained group-based model. Moving to a real templating engine. Better "social" features. Adding an external RPC API. Adding some sort of caching of search results or other complex queries that involve permission tests. And so on.

One deceptively simple feature request is to integrate PostGIS support. While PO currently extracts GPS data out of images and stores it in the database, it doesn't really do anything useful with that data. Integrating PostGIS support would instantly give PO access to a very powerful geospatial backend that can tie in to all sorts of other spatially-aware systems. There is a near-endless list of upsides, even if PO never uses anything more advanced than spatially-aware searching.

The downsides, however, are doozeys -- From an administration perspective rather than from a code perspecitve. First, due to the level of effort it would take to make PostGIS support optional, we'd have to require it across the board. PostGIS is not part of the standard PostgreSQL distribution, and would consequently make setting up a PO installation more difficult. It would greatly complicate upgrading an existing PO installation to a newer version of PostgreSQL and/or PostGIS, and upgrading to newer PO releases could also get more complex.

So all of that said, PostGIS support would be interesting and cool, but is it necessarily the right direction to take? I know PO is already used by at least one municipality to hold photos relating to their tax rolls, but without a better idea of real-world workflows, I don't know what PO can do to better tie in to the rest of their (or anyone else's) systems.

Meanwhile, regardless of PO's support for PostGIS, more user-visible features like "pull up a google map with locations of this set of photos marked" can be implemented, and now that I have a GPS widget for my camera, I'm actually interested in such things. :)

I get nearly no feedback from PO users; indeed aside from the freshmeat subscriber stats I really have no idea how many folks actually use PO. My best efforts with Google show a few dozen public PO installations, including at least two which the admins have independently translated into Russian. Come on folks, send me patches so all users can benefit from this work!

So, peanut gallery, any thoughts?

Syndicated 2008-10-13 16:46:41 from Solomon Peachy

To PostGIS Or Not To PostGIS, that is the question...

Development of Photo Organizer has slowed down lately, in part thanks to RealLife(tm) getting in the way, but mostly due to the remaining feature requests becoming increasingly more invasive. This isn't to say that these features aren't a good idea, but rather that due to PO's craptastic code structure, a seemingly "minor feature" would require a major internal overhaul.

Features like replacing the internal permission model with a finer-grained group-based model. Moving to a real templating engine. Better "social" features. Adding an external RPC API. Adding some sort of caching of search results or other complex queries that involve permission tests. And so on.

One deceptively simple feature request is to integrate PostGIS support. While PO currently extracts GPS data out of images and stores it in the database, it doesn't really do anything useful with that data. Integrating PostGIS support would instantly give PO access to a very powerful geospatial backend that can tie in to all sorts of other spatially-aware systems. There is a near-endless list of upsides, even if PO never uses anything more advanced than spatially-aware searching.

The downsides, however, are doozeys -- From an administration perspective rather than from a code perspecitve. First, due to the level of effort it would take to make PostGIS support optional, we'd have to require it across the board. PostGIS is not part of the standard PostgreSQL distribution, and would consequently make setting up a PO installation more difficult. It would greatly complicate upgrading an existing PO installation to a newer version of PostgreSQL and/or PostGIS, and upgrading to newer PO releases could also get more complex.

So all of that said, PostGIS support would be interesting and cool, but is it necessarily the right direction to take? I know PO is already used by at least one municipality to hold photos relating to their tax rolls, but without a better idea of real-world workflows, I don't know what PO can do to better tie in to the rest of their (or anyone else's) systems.

Meanwhile, regardless of PO's support for PostGIS, more user-visible features like "pull up a google map with locations of this set of photos marked" can be implemented, and now that I have a GPS widget for my camera, I'm actually interested in such things. :)

I get nearly no feedback from PO users; indeed aside from the freshmeat subscriber stats I really have no idea how many folks actually use PO. My best efforts with Google show a few dozen public PO installations, including at least two which the admins have independently translated into Russian. Come on folks, send me patches so all users can benefit from this work!

So, peanut gallery, any thoughts?

Syndicated 2008-10-13 15:46:41 (Updated 2008-11-18 04:11:58) from Solomon Peachy

Photo Organizer 2.36 is (finally) out

It's been stuck in -rc status for four months. Much less feedback this time around, which can be attributed to less interest, or perhaps the code's been more robust this time around. We'll see.

There are many more user-visible changes than usual this time around, ihcluding a nice dark theme, pretty URLs, and per-folder/album thumbnails. Oh, and a 40x speed improvement on a hot-path sql query. Yikes.

Each release has made PO's internals less obnoxious and easier to change, but I've hit another brick wall and the next set of internal improvements will be pretty invasive, with no real user-visible benefit.

Unfortunately, development has slowed down considerably lately, in part due to RealLife(tm).. but as always, it's nice to get feedback.

I also just switched PO over to using git. Due to differences in the usage model (from svn), there was no easy way to migrate the old history in the same repo and still continue using git's best pracices. C'est la vie.

Syndicated 2008-08-18 00:41:35 from Solomon Peachy

Photo Organizer 2.35

Yeah, Photo Organizer 2.35 came out two weeks ago, but I'd figure I should toot my own horn a little bit.

A lot of work went into making client/event management more, well, manageable. Multi-day events and the ability to directly tie clients to events tie into date-based searching to make it easy to find out just what you took for any given point in time.

Also new is pluggable authentication, two-step registration, sortable folder/album listings, much (much) faster exporting, plus a large pile of under-the-hood changes to facilitate future features. Oh, and an Italian translation.

v2.35a will probably be released this week with a small pile of bugfixes. Most of these bugs were found while testing out changes made to the development trunk.

On that note, there are a lot of cool things in the pipeline for v2.36; the most visible of which is a new theme! Rickard Olsson got the ball rolling and contributed a dark theme, which I then mangled a bit and committed. When combined with pretty URLs and per-folder thumbnails, things look pretty slick. It's funny how sometimes just how effective superficial changes can be.

Syndicated 2008-02-20 03:00:46 from Solomon Peachy

More ES1 gutenprint goodness

Gutenprint has accepted my second patch, so it now has a working Selphy ES1 raster driver. Unfortunately, it still requires a custom print spooler, but I'm now one step closer.

es_print_assist.c is now updated to properly poll the printer status, so it can now take the raw dump from gutenprint and shove it out to the printer with minimal delay.

The third step will be to rework it so that it can deal with an arbitrary file on stdin, properly parsing the dumpfile to determine length and paper type.. and for step four, adapting it into a proper CUPS backend. Yay.

Syndicated 2007-11-24 00:15:28 from Solomon Peachy