Solang 0.4 released

We are glad to announce the release of Solang 0.4. This is an unstable release introducing new features and improvements, and has undergone significant changes.

Solang is a photo manager for GNOME. It lets you manage your collection of photos by tagging them and searching through them based on various criteria — tags, EXIF data, etc; and offers a limited set of editing functionalities. Under the hood, Solang uses Tracker which allows it to automatically detect all the photos on your computer and publishes the tags all across the desktop.

New Features:

• Replaced our own database with Tracker. SPARQL is used to gain access to the meta information about the photos. Photos are in the Nepomuk desktop ontology represented by the class nmm:Photo. Tags are in the same ontology represented in its annotation section. They are represented by the class nao:Tag.

• The folder importer is now obsolete and has been removed because Tracker automatically indexes all photos on the system.

• Photo meta-data are now obtained from Tracker instead of reading Exif directly.

• Improved thumbnail management. Rely on an implementation of the Thumbnail Management Specification, such as Tumbler, for creating thumbnails. Created thumbnails are now stored according to the Thumbnail Managing Standard.

• No separate editor renderer. Photos can now be edited directly in the enlarged renderer.

• Moved the UI controls for the browser render’s pagination bar and zoomer to more standard locations. The previous and next buttons, and slider are now part of the main toolbar, while the currently displayed range is indicated in the status bar.

• UI cleanup. No text is shown in the thumbnail view and all additions or removals to the search basket are now automatic.

• New dependencies on GEGLmm, Tracker, D-Bus GLib and the org.freedesktop.thumbnails.xxx D-Bus services. Minimum required version of GEGL is 0.1.x.

• Dropped dependencies on Exiv2, Flickcurl, LibGdamm, LibGPhoto2, LibSoup and WebKit Gtk+.

Regressions:

• Camera and Flickr importers are absent.

• There is no date view or searching based on dates.

• Changes made to photos can not be saved and there is no undo/redo.

• The scale, brightness, contrast and saturation operations are missing from the editor.

• Tags do not have an icon associated with them.

Translations:

• Bengali (India) (bn_IN)
• French (fr)
• Hebrew (he)
• Polish (pl)

Thanks:

• Adrien Beudin
• Florent Thévenet
• Liel Fridman
• Piotr Drąg
• Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay
• Yasen Pramatarov

Download, Home Page, Support:

• http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/solang
• http://projects.gnome.org/solang
• https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=solang