revision 2.0.0c (2009-03-09)

* [Bugtracker] ticket 914
* [Bugtracker] ticket 920
* [Bugtracker] ticket 921
* [Bugtracker] ticket 924

revision 2.0.1b (2009-03-30)

* [Bugtracker] ticket 963
* [Bugtracker] ticket 962
* [Bugtracker] ticket 952
* [Bugtracker] ticket 961
* [Bugtracker] ticket 955
* [Bugtracker] ticket 945
* [Bugtracker] ticket 946
* [Bugtracker] ticket 947

revision 2.0.2b (2009-05-15)

* [Bugtracker] ticket 995
* [Bugtracker] ticket 997
* [Bugtracker] ticket 972
* [Bugtracker] ticket 994

Don't forget to uninstall (Start > All Programs > Piwigo - pLoader > Remove pLoader) previous revision before.

Hi,

I never needed such a program but now that I'm out of France and my ISP doesn't allow FTP use outside of France, I'll definitely use it!

I just tried it yesterday with a sample image, and looks like it's working pretty well! You save me hours of debugging to achieve the same ^^

A few remarks though (I'm using the Windows version):
- tiny bug I just found: when starting the program, the window thinks it's in fullscreen mode (ie I have the button to make it quit the fullscreen mode) while it's not, so of course I can't resize the window. If I click the "quit fullscreen", the window stays with the same size but I now have the "maximize" button, and from now on everything works normally.
- it would be useful in your property grids (like in "Global settings") to add an explanation for each value as some are not obvious at first without trying what it does
  - for "Site image width/height", you might use "max width/height" as if you choose 800x600 it won't make all pictures 800x600 if they don't have that ratio
  - I'm a little bit lost with the "preview" tab, same with the "site image filter/blur"...What is it about? At 1st I thought the "filter" was the "blur algorithm" used, but looks like it's the resize algorithm, so maybe the "blur" is a parameter for it?
- what I usually did before, when I could directly use my FTP, was to use a NConvert script to auto rotate without loss, then compress at 95%, put the images in a pwg_high, then create the thumbnails (75%) and normal (85%) out of the high ones. So basically I would be interested to be able to modify my high res images directly *on my computer* (because it's nice to auto rotate them, even if lots of viewer and image processing soft can read the EXIF, and also because compressing to 95% frees quite some space while keeping a really good quality).
- I would also really love having a way to specify the user rights for the pictures from your software (or the user rights for a category, but well, that can be done of course in piwigo later on...but here it would be easier as you could specify the rights for all the pics and categories, while in piwigo you have to manually modify each and every category (basically all my pics are private and you need to be part of a group to be able to see them)

Thanks again for that nice program,
Cheers,
  RizThon

Last edited by RizThon (2009-05-24 04:40:33)

Thanks Ron,

First of, I'm a programer too, so I might be able to help, even if I haven't used Perl since a loooooong time and that I'm more into C#. What IDE are you using? I'm on Windows and have of course Visual Studio .Net...
OK I found the bugtracker and repo...

ron wrote:

You're right, we'll try to improve this point with contextual help.

I just added a something in the bugtracker.

ron wrote:

Width/height in Global Settings are maximum values. If original size is lower, the resized image size is unchanged. If original size has a different aspect ratio, we also keep this ratio.  This may result in having resized images with different sizes.

I figured that out (that's quite logical actually), that's why my point was more in adding "max" to the name of the fields, to explain that the maximum possible height will be X, and maximum possible width Y. But well, that will be solved with the future contextual help.

ron wrote:

an exif preview may be available. The default is using it but you may choose not to. If pLoader does not use embedded exif preview, it uses "custom preview ratio" to resize the original : default value is 25% -> your original is 1600*1200, custom preview is 400*300. The preview is only used in pLoader.

OK, didn't know about previews in the exif info.

ron wrote:

the blur factor is a parameter for the resize algorithm. Specify blur > 1 for blurry or < 1 for sharp. See http://www.dylanbeattie.net/magick/filters/result.html  for samples.

OK, at first I was a little bit scared that my pics would be all blurred ^^

ron wrote:

If your images are already prepared on your computer, just uncheck "Resize site image" and "Auto rotate image" in Global Settings. Your originals will be used as resized images for Piwigo and pLoader will send them "as is".

OK about that too, but actually, now that I have pLoader, I don't really need to preprocess everything. Also thanks to pLoader I wouldn't have all those useless folders and duplicated pictures on my computer, but only my initial high res pictures.
So what I wanted to say here, is that it might be nice to be able to make some changes locally, like "Auto rotate image" (lossless transformation), maybe a "Resize" (I personally wouldn't use it), "Compress image" (compressing to 95% allows me to have pics of half their original size while keeping their quality, but people might want to compress them more).
That way, you would just need to open pLoader, your local pics would be modified as you want them (auto rotate and 95% comp for me), and then uploaded nicely.

ron wrote:

The initial design goal for pLoader was to create a simple tool for preparing and uploading images. We will add some Piwigo features in pLoader if it improves user experience. Your feedback is valuable, please open a feature request in our bugtracker.

I understand that, but as it already synchronizes the pics, as they are at once available, I thought it might be a nice addition. I'll add it to the tracker too.

I just tried really using pLoader now, with some real pics, quite bigger than the one I tried, and I always end up with my pics not being uploaded to the server because of error 500. Is there a maximum picture size that can be sent? Does it depend on your web config?

I also added another bugtracker issue/feature about drag&dropping folders instead of pics.

Cheers,
  Hank

plg wrote:

We've worked quite a lot :-) to make sure the filesize would never be a limitation. There are improvement in 2.0.1 compared to 2.0.0 in this field, and also between 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 (less memory used on server side).

I use pLoader on my own photos that are 3 to 7MB big (Canon 40D) and there is no problem.

Thanks Pierrick. I have a ".free.fr" website. Would you happen to have one too or know of someone who uses pLoader having one too? Just to know if it's supposed to work fine and if there seems to be some kind of limitation.

My ISP provides a webpage to send files to our websites (http://ftpperso.free.fr), but it's quite cumbersome as you can only upload 3 files at a time (and have to select each file one by one), and there's a 2MB size limitation...that's why I was wondering about any size limitation using your software. But when testing, some of my pictures were a little bit less than 2MB (like 1.7MB). So well, maybe the server was just unreachable at that time...

I just retried and have the same error:
11 images processed
0 images uploaded
11 images in errors and not uploaded - 500 Internal Server Error

I tried then again with the same pictures, but instead of using the categories I created through pLoader, I created some directories thanks to http://ftpperso.free.fr, synchronized piwigo, then tried sending the pictures in those non virtual categories, but it ends up with the same errors.

I eventually tried with 3 smaller pics, 44KB, 163KB and 835KB. The smaller pics are uploaded successfully but the bigger 835KB pic gives me a 500 error...

Cheers,
  Hank

ddtddt wrote:

I semploy  pLoader with free and it works

Thanks a lot for the feedback. So I guess it's not working for me because of connection issues...I'm working in Asia right now, and I have a 350ms ping for my website...

Is there a way (I mean programmatically) to have more information on the error, more than just the usual "HTTP 500"? Would it be possible to upload the picture in several tries? It could be a parameter, saying that pLoader should divide the file in pieces of x KB? I know that with FTP, the resume feature isn't enabled by my ISP. I don't know whether there's such a feature in HTTP and whether it can be enabled or disabled...

Cheers,
  RizThon

Last edited by RizThon (2009-05-25 06:48:23)