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ImagePrepare

current cersion: 0.14.2

Description

ImagePrepare was written to help me prepare the photo albums for this site. It allows to read a directory with images and then you can sort these and provide descriptions in various languages for them. Furthermore you can assign a rotation for each image and also if it is a panoramic picture. If you're finished with all this, you can choose an output directory for both the images and the SQL code and ImagePrepare executes the necessary rotations and scaling on the images and generates the SQL code. The generated SQL code is currently still bound to the database layout I use for my website, but at least you can change the names of columns and tables.

Requirements

Screenshots

These are 2 screenshots I made from ImagePrepare in action

Download & Installation

The installation of ImagePrepare is rather easy, first you have to download the sourcecode and unpack it. Now configure needs to be run from within the newly created directory. I suggest using the "--prefix /usr/local" option as this prevents ImagePrepare from being installed under the same directory that KDE itself is installed. On most Linux distributions KDE is installed under /usr and thus using this for ImagePrepare clutters your system. After configure finished without an error, you have run "make". This takes some time and when make is finished you have to execute "make install", which installs ImagePrepare in the directory you chose using the --prefix option.

Before you can use the program you need to add the installation path to the KDEDIRS environment variable (this is not necessary when you installed ImagePrepare into the KDE installation directory, then you just need to run kbuildsycoca). In the following part I assume you used the --prefix option with the path "/usr/local", if you used another installation directory, please substitute it. Also I'm focusing on the bash as shell, if you use another shell, please consult it's manual on how to set and retrieve environment variables.

Open a Terminal and set KDEDIRS via the command "export KDEDIRS=$KDEDIR:/usr/local" (if KDEDIR is not set in that terminal you need to set it to the KDE installation directory, which can be obtained by runnning kde-config --prefix). Now you need to run kbuildsycoca to update the KDE system cache. If the directory /usr/local/bin is not in your PATH environment variable you have to add it (a list of all environment variables can be listed by the command export), this can be done by executing "export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin". Now it is time to check wether ImagePrepare works, execute "imageprepare".

ImagePrepare is now installed and can be used (if there are any errors you can't sort out yourself, feel free to send me a mail). How you can permamently add the changed environment variables KDEDIRS and PATH to your environment depends on the distribution and login type used. Generally the following entries in the file 

$HOME/.bash_profile
or 
/etc/profile
ensure that every login shell has the variables set. 
export KDEDIR=`kde-config --prefix`
export KDEDIRS=$KDEDIR:/usr/local
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin
However it can be that you also need to put this into other files and places to make it work. Your distribution should have documentation on how to set environment variables.

Database-Schema

Following is a short introduction into the database schema that I use with ImagePrepare. The table names used in the following part are:

The tables images_albums_alb and images_albums_albtitle contain all information about one album, the date, the short name (for referencing) and the title in all languages needed. The other 3 tables do the same for the information about the pictures, images_albums_img contains the filename of the picture, the number within the album (for the correct order), the previous and next image number and a flag to indicate wether it is a panoramic picture. images_albums_desc has the description in all languages you want and the 2 tables are connected to each other by the images_albums_imgdesc table. The following ER-diagramm is maybe a bit easier to understand:ER-Diagramm des Datenbankschemas

Zukunft

My current plans are to improve the database schema support, the user shall be able to freely define how he want to organize the data. ALso I'm going to replace parts of the GUI, as there are known problems with the current and they won't be fixed. Finallz I'd like to at least put binary packages for Debian here and host this project on s sourceforge-site (or maybe even directly in KDE).

Webmaster: Andreas Pakulat