Change log

Fixed bugs:

• Selecting any of the arrow buttons on the "Photo Info" page takes you to the "Page Text" page for a different photo, instead of taking you to the "Photo Info" page for a different photo.
• Contact selector in the Album Invitor doesn't do anything when you hit "continue".

Other changes:

• Pixory now runs on Java/JRE 1.5.
• Added support for multiple Pixory instances in the same container.
• Pixory now uses Hibernate 3.1.2

Other changes:

• Improvements to the logical consistency of the navigation scheme.

Fixed bugs:

• The FTP server doesn't work in application servers that are not using the Jetty Servlet container.
• Selecting the AlbumIndex from an AlbumPage loses the current page selection, sending the viewer back to the beginning of the album.
• The BasicConfiguration page allows users to enter an "image root" which is an Album (no subdirectories), and then the lightbox doesn't work.
• When a viewer attempts to view an album which is "shared with listed contacts", and that viewer is not in the share list, they get repeated "you must first log in" messages, even after they have logged in.

Other changes:

• Pixory now uses HSQLDB 1.7.3.
• The FTP server now allows deletion of directories.
• FTP delete now works differently. The files are not actually deleted from the filesystem, but are moved to the .trash folder under the image root.
• Improvements in the Tables on the Sharing, AlbumBrowser and ContactLists pages; they now include date information and paging controls.

Fixed bugs:

• Photos with non-ascii file/path names might not appear properly when Pixory runs in Jetty 5 or Tomcat 4.

• Configuration->Advanced->indexing->rebuild->now broke in release 0.5.0, resulting in NullPointerException.

• Albums linked under the "image root" using symbolic links are not accessible to Viewers.

Other changes:

• German localization is now complete.

• The standard (standalone) Pixory application is now built on Jetty 5.

• There's a link from the Login page to the Viewer Home (front door) page.

• The page that sends email invitations to albums is now smarter. It will no longer allow you to do some things that don't make sense, like sending out invitations to a private album. Also, if you send an invitation to a contact that is not in the "share with" list for an album, that contact will automatically be added to the "share with" list.

Known issues:

• Images with non-ascii characters in their filenames/paths might not work on some JBoss platforms, depending on the version and configuration.

Fixed bugs:

• It was possible under some circumstances, e.g. your browser language preference is English but your java platform locale is de_DE, to get labels in two different languages at the same time.

Other changes:

• Pixory is now licensed as an Open Source project, under the GNU GPL.
• Email invitations to albums that are "shared with listed contacts" now include the recipients' username and password in them.

Fixed bugs:

• ognl.OgnlException: labels... caused by java.lang.StackOverflowError; when JVM default Locale is de_DE
• Running Pixory in App. Server. Logout leads to: "Pixory is unable to service your last request. Click here to start over."
• Random 'x's appear in some of the labels on the ViewerHome page.

Other changes:

• Pixory is now structured to allow easy localization. If you would like Pixory localized for your native language, please volunteer to translate some text.
• Pixory spricht jetzt Deutsch! (Pixory is now localized for German).
• Pixory now supports https when deployed into an App. Server.

Fixed bugs:

• Pictures that have filenames containing non-ASCII characters will now show up properly in Albums and the Lightbox.

Other changes:

• Pixory now has full support for non-Latin scripts (Unicode). You can use text input from any language in file names, album names, captions, narratives, and cover text. Technically speaking, all of the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) (Unicode 3.0) is supported by Pixory.
• Noticeable speed improvements in fetching images from Pixory. Previously, browsers were given no opprotunity to cache images-- images were refetched for every page request. Now browsers will refetch an image only when it has been modfied since the last time the browser fetched it. Technically, this is achived with a "conditional GET method", using if-modified-since last-modified headers.

Fixed bugs:

• Attempting the intial configuration using a hostname other than 127.0.0.1 results in hang/stack overflow. Yes, this should really be fixed now.
• Bug in "Configuration->Advanced->Indexing->rebuild now" that causes shares with listed contacts to disappear.
• After deleting Pixory database, popping out the contact selector for "share with listed contacts" selection causes Exception: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: XXX is not a valid album path...
• Using the 'download' button in the zip archive Album download dialog (from the Album Index page) results in error message.
• Mark album as "share with public", then delete album on filesystem. The album entry is still visible on the viewer home page (though the thumbnail doesn't show up). When viewer selects the deleted album they used to get a nasty exception message. Now they get a message that says the album is no longer available.
• Send invitation to an album that uses the share method "with listed contacts". When the recipient clicks on the URL in the invitation they get message: "You do not have privilege to access this album"
• Share album with listed contact. Then (re)move album on filesystem. When that listed contact logs in, he gets an exception message the prevents further action.
• Navigate to the Photo Info Editor (metadata page). Then remove image file from file system, click on the last path element in the navigation path bar, and get an exception message.

Other changes:

• There is a new Java property that allows Pixory to be initialized (configured for the first time) from outside the LAN: -Dwan.initialization.enabled=true.

Known issues:

• Pictures that have filenames containing non-ASCII characters will not show up properly in Albums or the Lightbox.
• One or two people have reported that, on Win XP, some pictures that were thumbnailed properly under Pixory 3.8 no longer work in 3.9. All of the pictures that I tested on Win XP worked properly in 3.9. Until someone provides me with reproducible test cases, I have to assume that there is no bug here.

Fixed bugs:

• "Hidden" .album directories are now really hidden on Windows.
• Dowloaded Zip archives have non-ASCII characters in filenames replaced with ASCII characters. This fixes a bug where some Pixory generated zip archives cannot be unzipped if they contained non-English filenames.
• Attempting the intial configuration using a hostname other than 127.0.0.1 results in hang/stack overflow.
• The top level "Sharing" tab describes some shares (with contacts) as "in effect", when in fact they are not. If an album is shared with certain contacts, but then has its sharing method changed to something other than "with listed contacts", the original shares will still show up in the "Sharing" panel. But this was a problem only with the *display* in the "Sharing" top level tab. The actual sharing that was in effect was the sharing method listed inside each particular album.

Other changes:

• WAN hostname now works differently. If you have configured a WAN hostname, all 'Viewer' URLs will incorporate the WAN hostname/mask WAN port settings for requests that appear to come from the WAN. This should better support the scenario where the request comes through an http proxy on the LAN.
• Pixory is now built on top of Tapestry 3.

Known issues:

• There is a bug in "Configuration->Advanced->Indexing->rebuild now" that causes shares with listed contacts to disappear. So this function is temporarily disabled until the bug is fixed.

Other changes:

• There's a new major section called "Sharing", which lists all of the "share by listed contact" information by individual entry.
• There are new sections under "Contacts" which show group memberships and albums sharing for each Contact.
• Introduced links across all of the album-share-contact relationships, for easy traversal.
• Page numbers are no longer displayed by default in the "Album Index". You can turn page numbers on for the "Album Index" with a new checkbox under "Album Attributes".

Fixed bugs:

• Sharing "by anonymous URL" does not allow anonymous viewers to access the album.

Other changes:

• Enhancements to the functionality and consistency of the navigation.

Fixed bugs:

• Sharing with groups now works.
• In the "Album Sharing" editor, after popping out the "contact selector" window, if the user hits "cancel" instead of "continue", the User Interface (UI) may behave very strangely.

Other changes:

• There is now a logout button for viewers, making it easier to switch between viewer accounts.
• Composer can now pre-setup viewer accounts.
• Composer can edit viewer passwords.
• Thumbnail quality is no longer configurable, at album or global level. All thumbnails now have quality "as good as it gets in Pixory".
• Improvements to error reporting in the log file.

Fixed bugs:

• Beta-3.4 introduced a bug where Photo Info->Image Properties were always empty.
• Previously, it was possible, under certain rare circumstances, to arrive at an undecorated "session timeout" page. It should now be impossible to see such a page-- if you ever see it, please file a bug report.
• Further reductions in the spam generated in the logs under certain innocuous conditions.

Other changes:

• Pixory now has a new, more powerful, sharing model. See the UserGuide for more info.

Known issues:

• In the "Album Sharing" editor, after popping out the "contact selector" window, if the user hits "cancel" instead of "continue", the User Interface (UI) may behave very strangely. This is just a UI issue and has no implications for the consistency of data. Please do not use the "cancel" button in the "contact selector" window. The workaround is to always use the "continue" button.

Fixed bugs:

• In previous releases, each time an error condition was encountered durin image processing, an error message would be generated in the log file. The same error on the same image file would generate a new error message each time it was reencountered. Consequently, log files could quickly grow very large, as the background thumbnailer would continuously produce log messages if there were any problems with image processing. In this release, Pixory will log an error message the first time an error is encountered on a particular image file, but will not log an error message on any subsequent encounters. So log files now tend to be roughly stable over time.

Other changes:

• Packaging of the "Web Application" distribution has been greatly simplified. In previous releases, the "Web Application" for Servlet based app servers was partitioned into a .war (web archive), and a bunch of jar files. The .war was deployed into the app server with other web applications, and the jar files needed to be installed into the shared lib directory of the app server. In this release, the "Web Application" distribution is packaged as a single .war that contains everything needed to run Pixory. This single .war can be hot- or cold-deployed on the app server without the need to fiddle around with any external jars. This has been tested with JBoss-3.2.3 and Jakarta Tomcat-5.0.16.

Fixed bugs:

• Basic Configuration save fails under certain circumstances on initial configuration.
• Public Catalog fails to display owner's name.
• Configuration->Advanced->Indexing->"rebuild now" can cause some albums to loose custom album cover settings.
• Auto-launched browser always opens URL based on the default port (8081), even if the user has configured a custom port in Configuration->Advanced.

Other changes:

• Pixory now runs under Mac OS X. See the UserGuide.html and limitations.html for more information.
• Browser launching now has it's own flag, instead of relying on the java.awt.headless flag. To ensure that pixory automatically launches the browser on startup: -Dbrowser.launch=true. To prevent pixory from launching a browser, -Dbrowser.launch=false. The default is "true".
• Ablum->Flow-> order pages by -> imageDate/fileName can now use ascending or descending order.

Fixed bugs:

• filename covered by caption in Album Index.

Other changes:

• Contacts now come in two flavors-- individual and group. Groups are compositions of other contacts. Both individuals and groups can be used as targets in the Album Invitation. Inviting a group is equivalent to inviting all of the individuals found under that group, even if some of those individuals are nested within subgroups.
• Albums can now have their page numbers automatically assigned on the basis of filename.

Fixed bugs:

• "ignore directories" not working.
• Can't paste into the "use other" date text field in the Photo Info Editor. Date Picker is difficult to use.
• After deleting or moving albums on the filesystem , album attributes might not update in the database. Produces 'SQLException, violation of unique constraint SYS_IDX2' in the logs.
• Changing Album "flow" on an empty Album (Album without any pictures) results in an application exception-- ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException in logs.

Other changes:

• Photos can now be marked "private". Private photos appear in the Lightbox with a turquoise background, as opposed to the white background for non-private photos. Private photos are completely invisible to Album "Viewers", that is they never show up in Album Pages, Album Indexes or Album Archive downloads.
• Albums can now have a "display name" different from the album directory name. The display name appears everywhere in the Viewer portion of the application. It's set in the Album Attributes section and defaults to the name of the album directory.
• Albums can now be set to "display filenames". A filename for each photo will appear in place of the caption if no caption has been set by the user. This filename will appear on the Album Index and individual Album Pages.
• The Album Index page now always display page numbers.
• There is a new procedure for handling lost passwords. Please see the FAQ for details.

Other changes:

• There is a new "Contact" management section for the album composer to maintain a list of names and their email addresses.
• The "Contact" list is integrated with the email album invitation sender. You can now use either names from the Contact list, or arbitrary email addresses in the "to" field.
• Tomcat users no longer need to include jetty.jar.

Fixed bugs:

• Public Catalog entries now lead to Album Index, instead of to first Album page.
• External entity not found: "http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-mapping.dtd". Pixory no longer fetches any dtds from external websites.

Other changes:

• Users can now enter their own "subject" lines in the email invitations.
• Background thumbnailing is now turned on by default. You can still turn it off in the Advanced Configuration.

Fixed bugs:

• Incorrect username or password on login now returns a generic "incorrect username/password" message.

Other changes:

• Pixory now fully supports text input and storage for all characters of the "Latin-1" (ISO-8859-1) languages. These languages are: French (fr), Spanish (es), Catalan (ca), Basque (eu), Portuguese (pt), Italian (it), Albanian (sq), Rhaeto-Romanic (rm), Dutch (nl), German (de), Danish (da), Swedish (sv), Norwegian (no), Finnish (fi), Faroese (fo), Icelandic (is), Irish (ga), Scottish (gd), and English (en), incidentally also Afrikaans (af) and Swahili (sw).
• Invitations now link to the Album Index, rather than the first individual Album Page.

Fixed bugs:

• "Use metadata" date selector, in Photo Info, does not find metadata for some images that have it. (thanks to Tim Chen for pointing this out)

Other changes:

• The html email invitation now includes the cover photo.
• There is a snazzy new calendar based date/time picker for date entry in the Photo Info
• Album Viewers can now download all of the album pictures at once, in a zip archive. It's on the Album Index page.

Fixed bugs:

• Image fails to immediately update after a rotation in the PhotoInfo editor.

Other changes:

• The "Composer" portion of the application has been graphically redesigned to be more attractive and more ergonomic.

Fixed bugs:

• Aberrations, usually 1 pixel wide strip along bottom or right edge, in thumbnails.
• Launching multiple instances of pixory on the same port result in multiple java VMs running, even though only 1 pixory instance is valid (Thanks to Alex Murzaku for pointing out)
• It's possible to to "re-login" to application via the home icon on the CatalogPage, even though you are already logged in. You then have AlbumBrowser running in the little window and the big window (Thanks to Alex Murzaku for pointing out)

Other changes:

• The "Viewer" portion of the application has been graphically redesigned to be more attractive and more ergonomic.
• 50x improvement in the speed of http upload on the AlbumTransfer page.

Other changes:

• Pixory now comes additionally packaged as a "Web Application", according to the Servlet 2.3 specification, for deployment in Java App servers.

Fixed bugs:

• Moving, renaming, or deleting albums under certain circumstances causes the Public Catalog to not work, displaying the message that " The Album or page you requested is not currently available in this Pixory server."
• When multiple public albums have exactly the same album date, only one of the albums show up in the public catalog.
• After changing the configured "image directory" it was still possible for people to see albums that had been vended from under the old "image directory". Now, Pixory never vends any image or album that is not under the currently active "image directory".
• Background thumbnailer hangs when moving/renaming/deleting albums on the filesystem at exactly the same moment that album is being traversed by the background thumbnailer.
• Several small memory leaks/creeps that accumulate over time. Pixory now does a better job of staying in its memory allotment (64MB win/ 75MB Linux).

Fixed bugs:

• Critical bug in 2.4 release prevented Pixory from launching for first-time (unconfigured) users.
• The background thumbnailer in the 2.4 release polls the filesystem for changes almost continuously, creating unnecessary load on the system. The polling frequency is now 10 minutes.
• Moving, renaming, or deleting albums under certain circumstances causes the Public Catalog to not work, displaying the message that " The Album or page you requested is not currently available in this Pixory server."

Other changes:

• It's now possible to "pre-cache" (generate ahead of time) thumbnails for an album. Hitting the "precache" button in the Album Attributes editor causes Pixory to immediately generate all thumbnails (scaled images), for all possible pages, for all the photos in that album. This eliminates any delays associated with the normal "on-demand" thumbnail generation.
• Pixory can now generate thumbnails in the "background". This can be toggled on and off via a checkbox in the Advanced Configuration. With background thumbnailing turned on, Pixory, behind the scenes, continuously scans all album directories for images and generate all thumbnails for any images that don't already have them. Background thumbnailing runs as a very low priority (in the operating system sense) activity so it shouldn't interfere with other processes running on the same system. Also, every time Pixory receives a regular web interface user request, it temporarily pauses background thumbnailing, so that the UI remains as responsive as possible.

Fixed bugs:

• Empty albums no longer show batch label "1-0"
• In the case where a number of pictures in the same album had the same date, measured to the nearest second, it was possible to trigger page reordering amongst those pictures by simply rotating one of them. Pixory now tracks image dates to the nearest millisecond, so this effect has been eliminated.
• Removed spurious warnings in logs on startup
• Removed spurious warnings in logs on logout
• Valid hostnames were failing valiation in the configuration fields. The hostname validator is now more accurate.

Other changes:

• The album "cover" now has a different meaning than in prior versions. Previously, the album cover appeared as the first page in the flow of regular album pages and it was possible to have an empty cover. Now the cover no longer appears as an album page. Instead, the cover now stands in for the album in places where you see multiple albums at the same time, for instance the "public catalog". Also, it is no longer possible to have a completely empty cover-- the cover image will default to the first image in the album, though you can still change it to any picture, as before.
• The "public catalog" (aka, the front door) now has a completely new (better) graphical design. Take a look at the screenshot on the pixory website to get an idea of what it looks like.
• It's now possible to specify a list of directory names that should be completely ignored by pixory. A number of people are using Pixory alongside other photo management tools that also create their own subdirectories in each photo directory. These "other tool directories" cause pixory to not treat the photo directory as an album (because of the no subdirectories rule). It's now possible to enter the names of the "other tool directories" in the advanced configuration, making those directories invisible to pixory.
• The ftp port is now configurable.
• The database has moved. It used to be located in a directory directly beneath the pixory.jar, meaning that it got deleted every time the user upgaded their pixory installation. The database is now located under the user's home directory ([home]/.pixory/data on all platforms). So this should be the last time the user has to "rebuild indexes" after an upgrade.

Fixed bugs:

• Pixory no longer pops out windows that are larger than the physical screen when following a "full size" image link.

Other changes:

• Pixory can now rotate (in 90 degree increments) images in albums.

Fixed bugs:

• On launch, Pixory now checks to see if another instance of Pixory is already running. If so, it launches a browser to connect to the already running instance and prints appropriate message on the console.
• Pixory no longer attempts to launch a browser when run headless.

Other changes:

• Pixory now has an embedded FTP server. This server is not simply grafted onto the web application as a separate entity. Instead, it is intimately connected with, and controlled by, the web interface. This allows for easy and secure drag-n-drop file transfers, file deletions, file renames, etc., between remote Pixory albums and the local desktop file manager.
• Certain long running tasks now produce a "running indicator", to let the user know that the application is working and not simply stalled out.

Other changes:

• You can now upload (http) image files into an album. You can upload the files individually, or in bulk in a zip archive. If you upload a zip archive, pixory will automatically unzip the uploaded archive and make the contained pictures available
• You can now download (http) an entire album at once, in the form of a zip arhive containing all the album image files.
• Both of the above features are on the new Album Transfer page.

Fixed bugs:

• relaxed overly restrictive email address validation in basic configuration that didn't allow '.' in name part of address

Fixed bugs:

• Line formatting (line breaking) is now preserved in the Album page narratives. Previously, it was all collapsed once you saved from the Album Text Editor. So it's much easier to write sonnets in pixory now ;)
• Image date on the vended Album Page now always shows the date set in the Photo Info editor. Previously, it would only show the file date, regardless of what had been set in the Photo Info.
• It is no longer possible to get an empty metadata popout window from an album page. If an image doesn't have metadata, the "photo info" icon no longer appears on the album page.

Other changes:

• Image dates can now be "bulk assigned" for all images in an album, from either the EXIF metadata or the file date. This is much more useful than the previous technique, which required setting image dates individually for each image. By default, all images get their dates from the file date. This can be changed in the new "flow" page.
• Pixory now automatically assigns page numbers based on the date ordering. You can still override this by manually assigning page numbers in the Album Page Editor. If page numbers have been manually manipulated, you can change back to automatic page numbering with a button in the new "flow" page.
• There is a new "flow" page that allows the album editor to control a couple of aspects of how album pages relate to time.

Fixed bugs:

• It's no longer possible to scroll off the end of an album index.

Other changes:

• Image scaling ("thumbnailing") quality can now be configured. There are three quality settings: "optimize for speed" (low quality), "compromise" (medium quality), and "optimize for quality" (high quality). These can be configured for each individual album (on the Album Attributes page), as well as for the lightbox (on the Advanced Configuration page). The higher quality settings should now produce noticeably better looking images.
• Some upgrades to the internals should result in a performance increase