MediaChest 1.1 preview (former R-PhotoOrganizer) | Download

To my wife Olga

Hardware check list: Pentium 133 equivalent or better power processor Pentium III 350 equivalent is recommended 64MB RAM or more 128MB and up is recommended Display resolution 800x600, 256 colors or better 1600x1200, true color recommended 4-40MB free disk space, depends on your current preinstalled software Sound card (optional) | Introduction W e use more and more computers in our life. You can hear word digital everywhere and for everything. Photography, books, music became digital for us. Even regular paper and pen became obsolete and replaced by PDA. Size of hard drive reached 80GB and it is far from the limit. I believe that all possible media in your life will be transferred to hard drive of your computer. In anticipation of huge amount of digital information on your hard drive, I wrote the R-PhotoOrganizer to organize digital pictures taken by a digital camera. But, very soon, I was convinced that it is far not enough, so I tried to find more universal approach capable to handle and catalogue any information residing on your hard drive. Since the program became more powerful, I decided rename it to MediaChest, although it sounds a bit ironically, because you usually grave something not in use anymore to a chest. I think that most people convinced that digital photography will replace any chemical pretty soon and no any reason in providing so obvious advantages of it, as simplicity of usage, reusability of digital film, instant photo development, and a possibility sharing photos with friends even over seas in a moment. Say more, latest Nikon's and Olympus' cameras surpass many traditional film camera in resolution and color reproduction. Finally, you can even get traditional hard copy of shots at competitive price. Words, like a digital dark room and a digital photo album entered in our vocabulary. Amateur photographers feel like in old good times, when photo-processing was under control from taking picture to receiving photo prints. A digital photo album allows to rotate pictures for pleasant view, making notices, putting date stamps, and duplicating pictures for friends. A digital picture keeps more information in opposite of a traditional film shot. There are a timestamp, an exposure information, a commentary, and even GPS coordinates. Sometimes that information isn't so useless, like somebody thinks. Timestamp information helps to memorize events, an exposure helps in improving photo skills, commentary adds fun, and GPS helps in memorizing place . Unfortunately, many photo editing programs neglect such information or even destroy it. So possibility to preserve the information and then restore it in a picture after an editing is useful. A sharing a photo album with friends by a publishing it on a personal web page, or sending by e-mail are indispensable capabilities of such kind software. More closed to digital picture follows music. Although consumer level of manipulation with digital music far from audiophile quality, considering that 90% of all music listeners use equipment not capable to reproduce music accordingly high fidelity standard, using MP3 format for digital music coding became very useful choice. Therefore, I started expanding media formats acceptable by MediaChest adding MP3 format. I will follow up with another formats including DVX. As for pictures, I concentrated mostly on organization music and using ID3 tags keeping essential information. No doubts that there are lot competitors, like MusicMatch and others, but as usually MediaChest provide unique capabilities you couldn't find in any other software. ### Why Java? If you can do more, than following to instructions of a wizard, and you like OS different than Windows, then 100% Java application MediaChest could be a your tool. Windows users are also very welcome. As a real Java application, MediaChest is distributed with the complete source code, so you don’t need to wait, when a vendor fixed some bugs. Of course, this version is free. ### Desirable and real features Real... Showing a specific information about a shot added by digital cameras. Showing all ID3 tag versions 1 & 2 information. Editing ID3 tags. Showing as original thumbnails prepared by camera, as full images. Playing MP3 files as separately, as a playing list, album, or by some specified criteria. Loss-less image transformation, like rotation, mirroring, and others. Manipulation with digital camera specific information. Image renaming, including customizable rename mask + topic. MP3 files renaming based on ID3 tag information by specified rules Creation image and music collections (albums). Creation HTML page for image presentation. Web upload to photo shops and music exchange sites. Storing collections to CD and database. Complete web publishing. and desirable... Printing photo albums. Using GPS info to search pictures. Export photo album to XML format to printing using another printing programs. Prepare slide show to upload to a digital camera. Add copyright, comment, and author tags to JPEG produced by digital camera. Slide show preparation in a portable format. Photo "stitching" capabilities. Flashpix support. Burning audio, MP3 and photo CD. Upload MP3 to players using USB and other interfaces. Sharing audio/photo collections over web and peer to peer protocols. ### Technique of using MediaChest GUI includes three major tabs - Album,. Browse, and Selection. Tab Browse allows you to navigate over your disk space, including flash memory cards (if you have a flash card reader installed). You can specify a flash card location for fast transferring its content to selection. When you select a directory, which contains images taken by a digital camera or MP3, you have to see thumbnails in the thumbnails viewer panel. Note, the program show thumbnails prepared by a digital camera software or provided in ID3 v2 tag. If an image format doesn't include thumbnails, you won't see them, (except you use JAI, when thumbnail images displayed for any file). All widely used digital cameras prepare thumbnail images. Since image format used Canon's cameras doesn't include thumbnail image itself, just provides its name, Canon camera owners have to have both images in a bunch. The latest Canon's cameras, like S20, produce Exif information in images, therefore there is no this requirement. To see image properties prepared by a digital camera, use right mouse menu. MenuFile in the menu bar works only for tab Browse, almost items of menu Tools are applied for tab Selection. If you switched off the menu bar, you can reach items of menu Tools using right mouse button somewhere on a tab frame. If you Macintosh user, press ALT key, to simulate right button mouse click. If an image or a complete folder of images should be renamed, or transformed, then you have to add such images to selection. Select tab Selection, when you finished a selection of desired images. Now, you can do renaming, transformation, extracting thumbnails, extract/incorporate Exif markers, or a generating of a web page. To incorporate Exif markers back to an image file, use transformation None. Before, you start using the program, you have to play with options a bit, to be familiar where you can find results of a work. The product supports media albums. To activate this feature, you have to have JDBC compliant database installed somewhere and accessible from your computer. For example, you can use MS Access database, if you run MediaChest on Windows machines. Use the option tab Album to set JDBC URL and driver class name. If you use any JDBC driver different than the standard JDBC-ODBC bridge driver, you have to add your driver in class path. MediaChest selects MS or SUN JDBC-ODBC bridge automatically. The current version uses JDBC-ODBC JDBC driver by default. It means, that you have to have some ODBC drivers and DSN presented on your computer. A using MS Access driver is recommended for newbies. To define DSN you have to open Control Panel, double click ODBC icon. You should see ODBC data source administrator panel. Press button Add in tab User DSN. You will see a list of drivers. Select MS Access driver and press Finish. You will see dialog ODBC MS Access Setup. Enter DataSourceName as: MediaChest. Add any comment. Press button Create, to specify a new database. You can select any name and location for the new database. #### Tips & Tricks Lack of a good documentation makes this section barely possible, but... Do you know that you can use HTML in titles and title templates? Just start you title, comment, or template with <html> and continue using HTML tags, like font and many others. Press Ctrl key and right mouse button to activate menu from upper panel. ### Web page generation This program provides a very flexible web page generation ability. You have to prepare a template for your web page, which will show thumbnails of your selection. See file ThumbnailsTempl.html as an example. MediaChest uses the following rules of substitution variables:
!%loop | marker of where generation loop is started
!%tnof | original (full image) file path name
!%tnif | original image file name
!%tntt | thumbnail tooltip
!%tnfn | thumbnail file name
!%tnc | commentary
!%endl | end of loop
!%tn+ | move to the next file
!%cprt | copyright note with link
!%alnm | album name
!%webp | related path on Web site to original images
| new added for albums
!%cloop | loop of child albums
!%praln | parent album name
!%pralr | parent album reference in URL
!%ch+ | next child album
!%cendl | end loop of child albums refs marker
!%chan | child album name
!%chap | child album URL
!%cendl | end marker of child loop
!%chan | child album name
!%chap | child album web path
!%txt | replaced by e-mail text
### Web Publishing The MediaChest provides wide spectrum of possibilities to publish photo albums on the Web. You can choose FTP, HTTP or direct writing to your Web site. Almost of ISPs give you FTP upload. HTTP upload can be useful in case of getting printouts from print shop sites. You have to contact to your favorite photo shop web site to get upload details to tune the MediaChest. The following setting will work for Snapfish upload: 1. In HTTP upload properties set; URL of upload servlet: http://www.snapfish.com/htmluploadsubmit/timestamp=980467347109?AlbumID=aaaaaaaa&AlbumCaption=XX&file=n.jpg Where: use id of target album, or aaaaaaa, if you would like to create a new album. AlbumCaption has to be set to album name of the new album (URL encoded). 2. Dest input name: file 3. Data input name: file0 4. Authentication: Login/Cookie 5. Login URL: http://www.snapfish.com/submitLogin/timestamp=980471543422/pns/getShoeBox/timestamp=980467294933 Not sure about twice using time stamp, but Snapfish's engineers couldn't give me better explanation. 6. Login input name: emailaddress 7. Password input name: password 8. Method: Get (post works also). Then specify your login information. In WebPublishing tab leave Picture location empty and check off Don't copy thumbnails&HTML. Selecting album location and id will be added to the MediaChest soon to avoid manually editing of HTTP upload settings. If you are an owner of a Web site, then you can enjoy direct copying albums to your site. ### If you an owner of Kodak or Sony digital camera Software of these vendors keeps thumbnail image in a raw format. MediaChest exports such image in BMP format, when it generates thumbnail files. Not all browsers can display BMP files. Kodak cameras also generate intermediate resolution JPEG image for displaying on LCD screen. I have a plan to include a possibility to extract such images. ### Known and Unknown problems See release notes about last minutes updates and the history of the program. MediaChest is pretty complex software, so some bugs may exist. If you met any problem, please send a report to dmitriy@mochamail.com. An attached log file will help fix the problem faster. Notice that the Address book is another project and it hasn't implemented yet. ### Acknowledges You couldn't enjoy MediaChest MP3 capabilities without work of Jeff Tsay, E.B, ebsp@iname.com, and Jens Vonderheide jens@vdheide.de.
Software check list: Java VM supporting JDK1.3 or newer. Java2™ Optional JavaMail API (only for e-mailing albums) Java Activation Framework (above requirement) Java Advanced Imaging (Only for viewing images and thumbnails in any format.)
Supported digital images formats and cameras: Exif (Jpeg, Tiff) CIFF (Jpeg) JFXX (Jpeg) Among them are famous digital cameras vendors, like: Nikon, Kodak, Canon, Fuji, Sony, Ricoh, Olympus, JVC, and many others. Supported MP3 formats: Mpeg layer 3, fixed and VBR ID3 tag versions 1 & 2
Installation This version is distributed as a ZIP file. Unzip this file somewhere on your hard disk. If you don't have preinstalled Java VM 1.3 or better on you computer, you have to do that.Visit Sun's web site to get JDK 1.3 or better. Hints: Since build 28, MediaChest can use Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) for viewing images in formats different, than JPEG, for example TIFF, Flashpix and many many others. JAI is also used for rendering thumbnails, if an image doesn't include one, or isn't JPEG or TIFF format. To activate this feature, you have to download current version of JAI , install it, and use MediaChest_JAI.bat as an example for launching. JAI includes some native code, which can be activated, if you copy DLLs to system path.The latest JAI includes an installer and does that automatically. Notice, JAI is compatible only with Java2. If you don't have JAI, then MediaChest won't use it. JAI is also very slow and memory consuming, so if you don't have a Sun's work station, or an Intel Pentium 4/Athlon 1.7GHz computer, using JAI can be annoying. Now, you're ready to launch the MediaChest. If you are going send albums by e-mail, you have to add mail.jar, and jaf jar files to your classpath.

Remember

Always do a backup copy of important images and music fragments.

Contacting information

To contact to the author, use e-mail dmitriy@mochamail.com. Any feed back is highly appreciated.