NOTE THAT THIS PAGE IS GETTING MORE AND MORE OUT OF DATE. WE NEED NEW SCREENSHOTS AND UPDATED TEXT TO REFLECT THE CURRENT FEATURES IN TRUNK. TEXT AND IMAGES COULD BE TAKEN FROM THE DEVELOPMENT UPDATES. VOLUNTEERS WELCOME!

USAGE AND APPLICATION OVERVIEW

First Time Startup - Setting up your Collection

See installation and startup instructions here: http://groups.google.com/group/phraymd/web/installation-and-running

The first time you start the app, you will be asked to choose your photo directory (see below). This directory permanently becomes your image collection. The program will find existing images and will keep track of new, deleted and modified images in this directory and all of its sub-folders.

After choosing your collection directory the program will open the main browser view (see below) and start scanning your collection directory and all of its subfolders for images, then load image metadata into memory and create thumbnails in ~/.thumbnails (if they don't exist already). The scanning happens in the background, so you should be able to explore the program while it scans. A progress bar will keep you informed of each step of the scan.

When you exit, the state of the collection is stored in ~/.local/share/phraymd/collection and settings in ~/.config/phraymd/app-settings. Delete the collection file if you want to start over with a new collection directory. Once a collection has been scanned and the collection database saved, subsequent restarts should involve much shorter scanning/verification steps.

The Image Browser

* After startup, you will see a contact-sheet like display of the images in the view and can scroll through the entire collection. The view of the collection can be sorted and filtered using corresponding widgets in the toolbar. The view is propagated in real-time on a background thread, so you should be able to interact with the program even while an intensive sort or filter is taking place.

* as you trace your mouse across the view you will see information overlaid above your images as well as shortcut actions ("hover icons"). The actions are save (not shown), revert (not shown), launch with default editor, edit metadata, rotate CCW, rotate CW, delete

* Right click for additional simple actions for images

* You can edit IPTC descriptive meta data (headline, subject, author, keywords etc)

After you edit meta data or rotate images, these changes are not permanent until you save them (either use the toolbar save button to save everything in the browser view, or click the hover icon to just save the changes for a particular image).

* select and deselect items by clicking on them -- see Working with Multiple Selections below

* get a full size view of an item by double clicking -- see Image Viewer below

* sort the view: sort by choosing a field from the sort drop-down in the toolbar

* filter the view: filter the view by typing search text into the text entry box on the toolbar and pressing enter. to clear the filter simply delete the text in the entry box and press enter.

* F11 to enter full screen mode (F11 again to exit)

* If you delete images from inside the program they get deposited in <image-collection-dir>/.trash

* contact sheet thumbnails are stored in the ~/.thumbnails folder (as per the thumbnail spec, http://jens.triq.net/thumbnail-spec/)

* A filesystem monitor keeps track of deleted, changed and new images (courtesy of inotify) and updates the collection and view in real-time

The Image Viewer

* Double click a thumbnail to see a larger view of an image in a sizeable pane. The viewed image will be highlighted with a white border in the browser. double click on the full size image to make it occupy the entire window. Press escape or double click again to return to the split pane view.

* You can view exif info for your photo by dragging down the the slider pane between the full size image and the toolbar (the exif display is a work in progress)

Working with Multiple Selections

* Selections are handled in a unique way in phraymd. Each image you click gets its selected status toggled. Images bordered with grey are selected. Unlike file managers such as nautilus, clicking from one image to the next doesn't reset the selection. To clear your selection you have to do it from the selection menu.

* The program supports batch operations on multiple selections (e.g. copy/move files, add/remove tags, edit a subset of IPTC descriptive tags). Select images by click on them and they will be highlighted with a grey border (shown below). The selection button in the toolbar will popup a menu that typically affects all selected images in the current view (but not necessarily every selected image in the collection):

The actions currently available for multiple selections are:

Select All: selects all images in the current view

Select None: deselect all images in the current view (that means some items in the collection could still be selected)

Invert Select: selected items become deselected and vice versa

Show All Selected: rebuild the view showing only those items in the collection that have been selected

Copy/Move Selection: copy the selected items in the view to a new folder location

Delete Selection: moves the selected images in view to <image-collection-dir>/.trash

Add Tags: adds IPTC space separated keywords to selected images in view (only adding those that don't already exist in the image)

Remove Tags: removes IPTC space separated keywords from selected images in view

Set Descriptive Info: set one or more IPTC fields to every selected image in view (subject, author, headline etc)

Batch Manipulation: crop, resize by common parameters *NOT IMPLEMENTED YET*

Select a range of images by selecting one, holding the shift key then selecting another (everything in the range will be selected). By holding shift the range that will be selected will be highlighted green (red for deselections). (More intuitive multiple selection support coming soon).

Currently Unsupported Features

* Collapsing duplicate images into a single item

* Retrieving images from camera

* "Folder View" (currently, you can see all items in a folder by filtering to the path of that folder, or right click an image and selecting open with Nautilus)