Imaginario for your desktop
Imaginario on the Ubuntu phone |
Anyway, the relative quietness the project had reached was starting to scare me, therefore since March I've been working on a desktop version of Imaginario, which shares the same code base but renders its interface via the QtQuick Controls module, which provides native-looking widgets on Linux, OS X and Windows. The goal is indeed to create a cross-platform photo manager, heavily inspired by the fantastic F-Spot which has been hibernating for the last 6 years but which I'm still happily using.
Imaginario is under development for your desktop! |
That's why I think this is a good time to share the news, in the hope that I could find someone else (besides me) who could test the software and report bugs.
What should work:
- Import your photo database from F-Spot
- Import your photo database from Shotwell
- Import photos from a folder
- Edit photo tags
- Search by tag (with OR/AND operators exactly like F-Spot does)
- Search by geolocation
What does not (yet) work
- More search filters (by date, rating)
- Hidden tags
- Exporting (but you can select photos and copy their URI to the clipboard)
- Translations of UI elements
- UI needs love
How to install and test it
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mardy/imaginarioIf you are interested in building it for other OSes, you can find the source code here, but please don't distribute any binary packages yet, as the software is all but ready to be used in the wild.
sudo apt-get install imaginario
Closing note on QtQuick Controls vs Ubuntu UI toolkit
Those of you who are familiar with the Ubuntu phone might wonder why I've decided to use the QtQuick Controls and not the Ubuntu UI toolkit like I'm doing with the phone version. After all, the Ubuntu UI toolkit has been specifically planned to support the desktop use case too, and it would be just natural to take its convergence feature into use and let it handle the desktop version too.There are a couple of reasons why I haven't been following this path:
- I want the app to be working in Windows and OS X too
- I want traditional desktop elements, such as split views, treeviews and menus
All in all, none of the above is a strong reason to chose one toolkit over the other; and it's actually not unlikely at all that in the future I'll decide to go for the Ubuntu UI toolkit on all OSes and all form factors; I've just made a contingent choice, which suits me fine for now but which I'm open to revisit anytime.
If anything, this double face of Imaginario shows the strength of Qt and QML: the same core C++ classes get exposed as two totally different user interfaces, and the speed of prototyping in QML makes this effort very cheap — I'm not afraid of literally throwing away one user interface or starting a new one from scratch.