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Pixaria 2.2.3 has landed

It's all change for me at the moment as I'm starting a new job tomorrow working right in the heart of the City of London at a very salubrious address almost next door to the Royal Exchange. This means that for at least a week or two, I won't have any access to pixaria.com e-mail during the working day with the possible exception of lunchtimes.

With all this change going on, it's been a top priority for me to finish off bug fixes and updates to Pixaria 2.2 and having slogged at it last week, I'm now ready to roll with version 2.2.3.

As usual, full details of what's new can be found in the version history but the poster features for this release are the ability for non-registered users to use the lightbox and a new beta Java Applet FTP upload utility for adding new images to your site.

There are also lots of bug fixes and minor enhancements in this release - especially to the admin area which now has pagination in many places to make it easier to work with large numbers of users and images.

To get the update, please send an e-mail to upgrade [at] pixaria [dot] com.

Important notes about version 2.2.2

I'm not sure how many people check out the version history and file changelogs before they upgrade but it's very important that you do because these two pages list important changes made between every version of Pixaria in great detail.

For the 2.2.2 update in particular, it's essential that you're aware the Pixaria config file has been moved to a new location, has a new name and that the settings need to be copied out of your old file and into the new one before you can use the script.

Don't forget that the template comparison tool can also be very useful when upgrading to make sure your custom templates are all working.

Pixaria 2.2.2 Released

Pixaria 2.2.2 is now available bringing (among other things) the much requested ability to search within search results and pagination in the admin search.

In order to help me manage the delivery of updates, I've done some internal reorganising in the Pixaria directory structure which will help me by allowing me to automate the process of zipping up Pixaria ready for distribution.

This is important because it used to take me about half an hour to get from my development version of the script to an e-mailable package whereas now it only takes about 30 seconds.

To make this happen, I've moved (among other files) the default config file from the includes directory into the base level directory which means if you're upgrading you MUST copy your settings into the new file. Please note that you cannot overwrite the new file, you must copy your settings into it!

I've also done some tidying in the resources directory and some optimisations on the Javascript for the site to improve the performance by reducing the number of distinct requests for files. Please make sure you check the release notes for this update before upgrading.

To get hold of the update, please drop me an e-mail...

Using Aperture 2.0

James Duncan Davidson writes about his experiences using Aperture 2.0 at the ETech and ecomm2008 conferences:

Aperture stood up to the test. It did the job. And it did it well. Did it do everything perfectly? No. But then again, Lightroom doesn't do everything perfectly either. These tools are still evolving and maturing.

Definitely worth a read if you're thinking about upgrading or cross-grading.

Improvements to image searching are coming

Various people have been asking about the new search engine which was introduced in version 2.0 and wondering what the plans are to improve it over the next few months... Well, I've been hard at work on some major enhancements to the search engine and these will be available in the next update which should be out tomorrow.

The most important change is that for the first time, the search engine will allow searching inside search results which considerably extends the possibilities for power users who want to quickly find images without using complex boolean search queries.

The second change is to the way searches are managed on the server. In the current release, you can only do one search at a time because the search terms are stored in a cookie. From version 2.2.2, Pixaria stores search queries in the database which means that it will be possible to run multiple concurrent searches for completely different subjects.

Finally, the admin search engine has been brought up to feature parity with the front end search engine and now boasts a better user interface with easy to use pagination of search results.

Introducing PhotoStackLive.com

As a developer, it's always interesting to see what people do with the software I write and with a user community as large as Pixaria, there are plenty of opportunities to see some really interesting work.

The latest to join the stable of websites powered by Pixaria Gallery is PhotoStackLive.com which has been created by English photographer Jason Friend.

Based on Pixaria 2, this website has some great customisations such as the novel looking front page which breaks with the traditional gallery look by substituting a giant 'tag cloud' interface to the search engine.

If you're putting together your own Pixaria site, this site's definitely worth checking out - and the photography's pretty amazing too.

Major Divestock Update

The Divestock website has been updated over the weekend to add some much requested new features.

1. Profile updates no longer need to be approved before being pubished.
2. Only profiles updated in the last 30 days are publicly visible.
3. You can add an avatar image to your profile.
4. New thumbnail layout view for browsing members.

There's more coming in the next few weeks so whether you're a current member or not, why check out the new look site here and make sure you register to be included in the listings.

Black is the new... Black?

Everyone knows Steve Jobs likes his black turtlenecks but yesterday's iPhone SDK event was a veritable catwalk show of black clothing with everything from sweat tops to polo shirts on parade by the event's guest speakers.

I wonder whether they were told to wear black tops (a couple didn't) or whether it's some weird side effect of working closely with Steve Jobs...?

Anyway, the most important news for me was the release of the SDK - I'm really looking forward to some cool new apps for my iPhone!

Keywords and searching documentation updated

I've updated the documentation topic covering searching and keywords to reflect the new features of Pixaria 2.0. The updated documentation covers the process for importing IPTC keywords and how to edit them once they're linked to images in your library.

I've also added some information about how to construct search queries in Pixaria 2.0 with information about using the new boolean operators, parentheses and quotes to isolate exact phrase matches.

Check out the updated documentation page here for all the details.