About Lowfat
Lowfat is a "document viewer with a twist" by MacSlow. In short, it is a very exciting photo application where you can spin, sort and browse a collection of photos.
MacSlow implemented lowfat as a quick hack and has yet to provide more than a very very cool environment to play with photos.
Dying to find a use for this cool environment, I decided to hack on lowfat, making minimal changes but trying to make a useful tool out of it.
I have put my changes online so you can clone my changes with git:
git clone http://git.kaizer.se/lowfat.git
The changes are built on top of MacSlow's public lowfat repository
New features: photo sorting light
The new features are just added hacks although I hope the patches are reasonably clean. You'll see that the new photo management options are pretty minimal.
What I foresaw for my own use was to use lowfat to view and sort a bunch of new photos, sorting them into piles (keep versus trash and good versus incredible) and so.
- Grouping: Assign selection to group # by pressing shift-# where # is a number 0-9, select a previously defined group by pressing its number. Groups are presistent, and are saved in the state.txt file
- Browsing: Select a group of photos and repeatedly press tab to cycle through them. Neat for making a mini-slideshow or deciding which photos to keep.
- Process.py: process.py is a python script in contrib/process.py. The script reads lowfat's state file and sorts all photos into folders by group (using hard links), and may also rotate the photos to the rotation they were saved with in lowfat. This is my solution for making lowfat into a hacked-up photo sorting tool.
- Epeg: To be able to sort and view even large camera jpegs, I found and used the Epeg thumbnailing library. Epeg allows to load jpegs to a specific (thumbnail) size so that only the portions needed need to be decoded. Using epeg in lowfat and restricting jpegs to 1024px allows me to load even 10 Megapixel images pretty fast into lowfat. Epeg is part of Enlightenment's development code, and not widely available, but debian packages and source code is available from http://debian.alphagemini.org/ at the moment.
Other changes
- Shift selection: Implemented shift-click deselect of already selected image
- Fixed a crash when restoring selection (enter) after having removed some images
Non-changes
- The original lowfat repository has some non-trivial line ending problems, in that most files use CRLF but some files mix line endings. That is a nightmare to resolve either way, and regrettably I didn't do anything about it before beginning to hack on lowfat.