Chhobi is a photo organizer program. It does not have facilites to do any
editing of the image data itself (so no red-eye removal, contrast enhancement
etc. etc.). It simply allows you to change captions and keywords on photos.
The captions and keywords are stored in the EXIV metadata, so they are in a
standard format, stored in the image file so they travel with the image
(when you copy/move/backup them) and can be read by other programs, including
some folder managers (e.g. Finder on Mac) and not locked up in some complex,
properitary format that will vanish in a decade or so.
My main aim in designing and writing Chhobi was to keep the interface (and code)
as simple and uncluttered as possible, and do one thing only, which is to browse
and organize large libraries of pictures.
Usage
The main browsing interface is the Ribbon, which represents each picture as a
small tile. The tiles are arranged in order from latest to oldest. Hovering the
mouse over the tile causes a preview and the photo metadata to appear.
Clicking on the tile will "lock" the preview and allow you to move your mouse
without changing the preview. The caption, date and keywords can be edited. You
can use the left and right mouse buttons to step through the pictures. Pressing
h will cause the photo to be added to the holding table. You can click and
drag the mouse to select multiple photos.
Click on the tabs to switch between the show and hold tables. Clicking
resize will cause the held photos to be resized and copied into a temporary
folder. When the progress bar completes and the mail icon becomes enabled
you can drag the mail icon and drop it onto an email program or a browse for
file field of a webpage to add the resized photos.You can also open the folder
enclosing the resized photos by clicking on the folder button. Note that the
original folder structure of the images is maintained, so all the photos are
not copied into a single folder.
The funny squiggle is the letter chh in Bengali. chhobi means picture
License (GPL)
Chhobi is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
Chhobi is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with
Chhobi; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA`
Thanks
Like most open source projects Chhobi builds on other open source
endevours. Chhobi depends on, is the better for, and was easy to write
because of these fine pieces of open source software:
- QT -
from the trolls at trolltech (now nokia). An amazing toolkit to write cross
platform GUI programs for Mac, Linux and Windows.
- Exiv2
- a well written and well documented c++ library for manipulating photo
metadata.
- sqlite
- what a database engine! tiny, fast and is suported by QT's database
classes.
Related projects on Sourceforge
Like most open source projects Chhobi has many alternatives, each
with different flavours and feels. Here are those hosted on sourceforge
[
go].
� 2012 Kaushik Ghose
