imageserver

ImageServer is a software for maintaining archives of images. There's much software available to manually view, categorize and search images. ImageServer was designed to solve a different problem:

Imagine being a photographer or photo agency: You have a lot of images in many formats, all stored in a directory structure - your archive.

This creates at least two problems:

- The archive may contain different images with the same name. What do you do when a customer orders "flowers.tif" and this name exists in twenty different subfolders in your archive?

- The customer doesn't need your original 22megapixel 16-bit tiff file for his powerpoint presentation or layouting, he wants a small jpeg instead.

The first problem can be managed by assigning unique names to images every time an image is put into the archive.

The second problem is a little more difficult. You'll have to convert the requested images to smaller JPEGs. After doing that for too many times, you start caching the small JPEGs so you won't have to convert again for the next customer asking for that image. But then, you edit the original image and forget to update the JPEGs. Furthermore, its not enough to keep these resized jpegs for presentations, your customer's graphics department also wants correctly downsampled eps images for layouting advertisements in QuarkXPress. So you start having two slaveArchives - one with JPEG and one with EPS images - and spend half of your day trying to synchronize the three.

ImageServer solves both problems automatically. It is a program with a nice GUI, configured to watch your masterArchive. As soon as images are put into any subfolder, they'll be assigned unique names if necessary. Afterwards, each image is read, and for each defined slaveArchive, a preview is created and saved. The same happens when an image in the masterArchive is altered. All this works completely automatically, there's nothing you'll have to do; the GUI is just for being able to watch what's happening.

I know that there's probably not many people interested in using this, as its very specialized. But please, tell me below what you think!

Added a WorkQueue manager
Added possibility to remove single events and all events from workqueue
Now using KDE ListViews for alternative row background color, increasing readability
ImageServer is now a KApplication (using nice icons etc.)
Now using KDE icons from the KDE dir, instead of copying them
Its possible to arrange the UI to your personal preference using a swappable and rotatable slider