wingolog

notes from the gaining daylight

It is alternately Christmas Eve's Eve, or the day of the Barça--Real Madrid game, depending on your religion.

My neighborhood had its yearly festival earlier this month, oddly scheduled in the winter. There was a correfoc:

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In other December news, I did end up cooking thanksgiving, with a turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, a dozen guests, day-after gumbo, etc. Sixth in a row outside the US -- perhaps next year I can get someone else to cook it for me.

And, in the vein of home cooking, I fly home to North Carolina tomorrow, if the plane gods permit.

photo gallery hacking

My web photo gallery software, Original, tries to present a taggy interface to your photos (example). The tag cloud is really interesting when it's small, because each new addition of photos makes a notable impact on the shape of the tag cloud. However after you have about a thousand photos or so, it's more difficult to see your new photos, and how they relate to older ones.

Since about version 0.4.0 or so, the excellent F-Spot marks photos that you import as being in a "roll" -- each import makes a new roll. This is pretty interesting information, allowing a more chronological presentation of photos.

Rolls also take burden off of the tagging interface -- without some kind of chronological discretization, tags get misused for navigation. The gallery index used to show the large tag cloud just so photos with lesser-used tags can be found. Now, with rolls available, one can search for photos via the two axes of time and tag, as well as get more targeted tag listings.

The one problem now is all of the photos that you have in your f-spot library that were imported before roll information began to be recorded. I wrote an f-spot extension to handle this case, which is currently still sitting around in bugzilla. If you trust me, you can install it by copying the built DLL into your ~/.gnome2/f-spot/addins/ directory. You use it by selecting a set of photos, right clicking on them, and selecting "Assign to new roll" or whatever it says. Good luck, and bugs to that bugzilla report.