Thumbnail/crop/rotate preview

[coolice]

Hi Axel,

I would like to start with an important note : i do not want start again and endless thumbnail discussion.

I am just planning to buy this superb application, but I am really missing these 3 and only these 3 features, and something came to my mind. I don't want to be the smart ass, I am just working with 70-72000 images at once, being a photo & video gallery service provider and running development team.

Can it be/What if this thumbnail/crop features would be implemented as plug-in ? Even by an external person, like I am. I did not found any information, how wide you open documentation on your plug-in interface, but I though, at this way it could be an option, what every of your customer/fan can decide to use or not, on the other hand also would help those who really missing these, not to mention, that also you would keep the main scope of this application. Having an option to have a full page thumbnail preview often helps even in large amount of images (i use myself too) to look for certain types, identify corrupted images, randomly select bunch, etc. Switching between applications are not a very good options, and I am trying to avoid whenever I can.

Regarding to thumbnail preview : I made a test with 71500 jpg images re-seized to typical windows file explorer calls "large icon", and the thums.db size I had manually created were around 1.4 Gb, which is sound big, but in an "indexed" way, still not using any "real database", screen portion selection could be shown instant, and pointing to it to show an enlarge version of the image just like present thumbnail viewer you have implemented would take the same amount of time. Even-though every customer of yours coudl decide on their own to use and not use it. Still technically possible, and would match the amazing super speed of fastpictuerviewer.

Regarding to cropping/rotate : based on my experience these are the basic features (just like file management ones you already implemented) which are required during large amount of image selections. I know about the factory raw containers and the automatic rotating. But : 1. there are customers like myself who using large amount of images which are not in special containers, but still would be great to be able to crop an image and check weather it is usable at that way or not, with immediate comparing to the others, without wasting time of loading any external application. 2 : automatic rotating often fail, and in several scenario (such as portrait photos) need to be compared with the others in a manually rotated way.

As I mentioned earlier, even if it is not core-build-ed into fastpictureviewer, maybe it would be possible to add these basic required selecting/processing features as a plug-in ?

Many Thanks for your time and help,

Mr. Andras Bakos

[Axel]

The plug-in interface is still evolving as I write this, as I work on advanced plugins like the IPTC Editor or the File Utilities plug-in, which both require complex two-way interaction with FastPictureViewer. Things will settle down a bit in that respect once v1.5 is out with the new IPTC editor.

I can provide a plug-in skeleton that implements a working "do nothing" plug-in which can be evolved from. FastPictureViewer plugins are COM components implementing a couple of specific interfaces and registering themselves in a specific component category. FastPictureViewer provides a set of services to its plugins so they can call back into the host and have it perform things for them. Plugins are best developed as C++/ATL components. The program discovers plug-ins at runtime without the need for any special configuration.

Plugins must be digitally signed with a valid Authenticode certificate issued by a trusted certification authority (the program will not load and call into unsigned code). If a plug-in is intended to be redistributed (as opposed to private-use plug-ins) then it must be made available in 32-bit and 64-bit form as I insist to maintain the current 100% parity between 32-bit and 64-bit editions.

You mention thumbs.db so I take it that you are running Windows XP. More recent versions of Windows made huge advances with regard to digital image handling, with proper extensibility point for 3rd parties like us to provide support for extra file formats.

Windows 7 Explorer combined with our FastPictureViewer Codec Pack becomes a very potent image manager, with high quality jumbo thumbnails, metadata display, instant search and more, making implementing (yet another) thumbnail panel extension a moot point. Users also benefits from the latest improvements in Explorer, like the new Libraries and other goodies.

Nevertheless, there is no inherent limitation to what an FPV Pro plug-in can do, so in theory a thumbnail panel could very well be implemented in a plug-in, so is an image-processing add-in that could perform lossless JPEG rotation, for example. Actually most of the up-coming functionality will be added by the way of plug-ins, the core FPV Pro product has been pretty stable for some time already and will likely stay like this in the foreseeable future.

I'm glad to learn that you use FPV Pro to browse images 70,000 at a time, there are very few products on the market that could make similar claims