By Kristian Kißling
Users looking for a fast and lean photo manager typically find the F-Spot and gThumb programs. Whereas the former suffers from performance issues and requires some getting used to, the latter is fairly quick; however, it is no longer under active development and suffers from a less-than-intuitive GUI as well.
A search for alternatives also turns up the fairly new Solang [1] program. The current 0.3 version of Solang is still alpha, but the photo manager, which is written in C++, displayed some interesting qualities in our lab. That said, if you are looking for stable software, you might want to wait for version 1.0 to be released.
First, I'll look at the installation. On Ubuntu 9.10, you can simply use the package manager to install the software on disk. If you have Fedora 11/12, just pop up a terminal and enter:
$ su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing install solang'
On openSUSE 11.2, I was unable to compile the Solang 0.3 source code.
Most of Solang's GUI is occupied by a panel on the right that displays the images (Figure 1). The Browser, Enlarged, and Editor buttons below this panel let you decide what Solang should display. By default, the software launches in Browser mode and shows you a preview of the images it has found.
Pressing Photo | Import from | folder lets you assign the required image folder. Solang will display 50 images per page. To reduce this number, click on a number in the Photos per page drop-down box. Just enter a new number and press Enter.
Pressing Enter tells Solang to apply the value. Solang will attempt to open the assigned folder whenever launched. To change this behavior, reset the software to its original state via
rm -fdR ~/.local/solang
To the right of the Photos per page drop-down box, you will find a slider that lets you change the size of the thumbnails.
To enlarge the images themselves, select the Enlarged button below the browser window or double-click an image in the browser view to be displayed on a larger scale. At the same time, the icons above the image will change. You can use the magnifying glass icon to zoom into an image or zoom back out; the white triangle launches the slide show.
The orange-colored arrows load the next image; you can use the Alt+Right arrow or Alt+Left arrow shortcuts to do this, too. To view the image in full-screen mode, click the icon with the four small red arrows. To return to the previous view, press F11.
To edit a photo, you cannot simply click the Editor button. Instead, you must first select the images you want to edit in Browser mode. Then, select Edit from the drop-down menu of one of the images or click the pen icon in the menu bar.
In Editor mode, you can edit the selected image with the tools from the panel to the right (Figure 2). This includes rotation in 90-degree steps, vertical and horizontal mirroring, scaling, and adjusting the brightness and contrast. If you apply multiple steps to an image, a special feature applies: Solang lets you press Edit | Copy Actions to store the changes you have performed. Then, you can open another image and perform the same steps by pressing Edit | Paste Actions.
Pressing Ctrl+Z lets you undo any mistakes. Modified photos can be stored by clicking the icon with a small orange arrow pointing to the hard disk. The software will also prompt you to save if you return to the Browser view without saving the images.
More functions are available to the left of the image. This is where the Properties, Picture Taken Date, and Tags tabs are located. The last of these tabs lets you add terms to images. Tags | Create Tags lets you create a new term - for example, Holidays in Cuba. Then you can select all the images to which this tag applies in Browser mode and select Tags | Attach tag to selection from the menu. If you then click the Holidays in Cuba keyword, Solang shows you all the images in the folder with that tag.
By pressing the Picture Taken Date button, you can change the date on which the photos were taken. The software displays this value in a bar chart. If the recording dates are missing because you scanned the photos in, the software incorrectly sorts the images into the year 0 or (this happened in our lab) into the year 109.
That just leaves the Properties button. The Histogram tab shows you the histograms for the selected images, and lets you visualize the statistical frequency of color value distribution in an image and choose between a linear or logarithmic view. Additionally, in the Basic tab are listed the Exif data for the photos.
Last but not least, Solang also has an Export Queue. This practical feature lets you select a number of photos that you want to email to a friend from a huge collection. Just right-click one of the photos and select Add to Export Queue to add the image to the virtual queue. Photo | Export to | folder lets you move your selected photos to a new folder, which you can specify in the next dialog. If you also check Create an archive, the software will create a ZIP archive of the selected photos above the selected target folder. Then, you can mail the archive or copy it to a server on the network.
The Photo | Import from item gives you three options: either import images from a folder, a Camera, or your Flickr account. In the latter case, Solang opens its own mini-browser, which takes you to the Yahoo account. The software prompts you to enter a nine-digit code in this case.
Solang still has a couple of bugs, which is quite normal for alpha software. It always starts with the same image gallery that you selected on first launch, unless you delete the configuration file. Although you can drag and drop the widgets in the main window, this can wreak havoc with the interface. When you toggle between modes, you might get the wrong view, and the utility value of histograms is questionable.
The software runs fairly quickly and is intuitive to use. All told, Solang is still a construction site, but one that could develop into a very usable building in the not-too-distant future.
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[1] Solang download: http://rishi.fedorapeople.org/solang/
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