Introduction

Purpose of this application

fotoalbum can be used to quickly organize, describe, tag, rotate, edit pictures and related files. It contains advanced features to search and find pictures, too.
Big collections can be handled easily (mine has grown to about 6000 pictures now).
You can export single pictures or groups of them with various options (with/without thumbnails, html indexpages, original size/shrinked, ...).

Why use it? What is so special about it?

There are some special concepts behind fotoalbum which lead to some advantages. But there are two reasons ordinary Joe User might not like this application:

• The application has some rough edges (for example there is no drag and drop and it depends on external programs for some features) This can be sorted out.
• To benefit from using this application, Joe User needs to understand some concepts like files, directories, symbolic links (like they exist on unix filesystems) and less simple things described below. This might not be a problem, but have you ever tried to make your parents (age 50+, little or no computer experience before) use a computer and tried to tell them about files and directories?

There is a step-by-step example which explains the basic concepts and shows how to use this application.

Additional information is not stored in the picture files

Once you have rotated and maybe edited the picture (red eyes, brightness, contrast, ...) the file is left untouched. So if you change the pictures comment, date/time or keywords afterwards the original file is still the same. There is no need to backup this file (which usually is big in terms of disk space) again.
So this is an advantage if you care about backups. You really should care about backups if you like your pictures.
Furthermore, there are some file formats which are not able to contain additional data (comments and keywords). Using such file formats is no problem with fotoalbum.

Organisation of groups and pictures in the album is independent from organisation of directories and files on the filesystem

This is for easy backups again. I'll explain it by showing how I organize my pictures on disk.

Everytime I get a bunch of new pictures, they are simply put into a hierarchy like this:

               mypictures
               + 2002
               | + 02-23
               | | + img0001.jpg
               | | + img0002.jpg
               | | + img0003.jpg
               | | + img0004.jpg
               | + 03-25
               |   + img0005.jpg
               |   + img0006.jpg
               |   + img0007.jpg
               |   + img0008.jpg
               + 2003
                 + 01-18
                 | + img0021.jpg
                 | + img0022.jpg
                 | + img0023.jpg
                 | + img0024.jpg
                 + 03-25
                   + img0105.jpg
                   + img0206.jpg
                   + img0407.jpg
                   + img0508.jpg
          

So I have a directory for every year with subdirectories with the pictures I got one day. So when I create a new backup CD, it is easy to find out which directories have not been backed up yet. It is important to never add a picture to an old directory or edit a picture in an old directory. Just create a new directory and picture file.

Of course this hierarchy is not how you want your album to look like. But this is no problem, as the hierarchy in the album is completely independend. In the album you create groups (similar to folders or directories on your filesystem) as you like and move the pictures, which correspond to certain files on your disk, around in those groups without changing anything on your disk.

Hyperlinks can be used

In the descriptive text for a group or picture you can include links which point to other groups/pictures. By clicking such a link, you will be shown the referenced element.

You can also link other files, like big text or html files describing some event.

Symbolic links can be used

I'll explain this with an example, let's call it 'Best of'. You have a group with all your pictures of the summer holidays, far too much to show to your friends (some boring ones in between, but you like to keep them).

You create another group, which is a link to the group mentioned before. The new group does not contain any pictures yet, but it shares the comment and keywords with the original group. So when you edit the comment or keywords on one of them, the change takes effect for both of them.

Inside of the the new group you create links to the original pictures you want to show to your friends. Again, if you edit comment/keywords/date/time on the link or on the original picture, it takes effect on both of them.

The possibility to use links means less work for you and less disk space usage.

Advanced search features

You can search for words in a group's or picture's comment and keywords and will be shown a hierarchy like the original one, but with only those elements left which match the search criteria.

Another great feature is to get a view of your pictures sorted by date and time, no matter how they had been organized on disc or in the album.

Every search creates a new view (on which you can perform another search).

Powerful little helpers

There are some other features which might not exist in other albums, like

• batch rotating
• adding keywords to a set of items
• (batch-)timeshift, so if you got pictures from a friend with date/time being off by some amount, you can correct all of them in one step
• Powerful plugin interface
• Maybe more, but I won't list every little feature here