Releasing Desktop Flickr Organizer

About

Desktop Flickr Organizer is a flickr photos organizer right on your own desktop.


Why should you be using it?

Flickr's web based organizr is slow, updates take time. You can only use it when you're online. DFO on the other hand, stores all the updates offline, and with a simple and intuitive graphical interface, allows you to be way more productive. You'll never dread having to organize sets, edit titles, descriptions and tags for the hundreds or thousands of photos you've accumulated. And you can do all this editing, when you're just trying to kill your time in train, or that long plane trip.

What all does it provide?

1. Uploading and downloading of photos. You can download selected photos or the entire sets.
2. Edit information attached to photos; delete photos from stream.
3. Add/Remove tags associated with photos.
4. Create new sets, edit set information, add/remove photos from sets, delete sets.

More about it on its homepage http://code.google.com/p/dfo

अब तुम हिंदी में ब्लोग कर सकते हो

कभी सोचा है कितना fundoo होता अगर आप "Haal kaisa hai janaab ka" टाईप करते और वह अपने आप जादू से "हाल कैसा है जनाब का" में convert हो जाता? हमने आज वह संभव कर दिया है अपने नए blogger transliteration feature से। अब आप अपने विचार, अनुभव, और तो और अपने पसंदिदा bollywood गाने भी publish कर सकते हैं।

Transliteration option को enable कर आप हिंदी के शब्द टाईप कर सकते हैं, उनकी अंग्रेजी धव्नी के समान शब्द लिख कर, और अपनी आंखों के सामने आप इन अंग्रेजी शब्दों को देवनागरी में बदलते देखेंगे। और तो और, आपको अंग्रेजी शब्दों से हिंदी शब्दों कि mapping भी नहीं याद करनी पड़ेगी। इसका मतलब आपको WeiRD UpPerCasEing कि चिंता करने कि ज़रूरत नहीं सही हिंदी spelling के लिए। बस वैसे ही टाईप कीजिये जैसे कि आप करते हैं, अपने style में, और गूगल को आपका मन पढ़ने दीजिए। ह्म्म्म, लगभग। हमने जाना कि सबका हिंदी शब्दों को अंग्रेजी में लिखने का अपना अलग तरीका होता है -- इसलिये हमने एक personalization mechanism डाला है जो आपका लिखने का तरीका याद रखता है। एक बार ठीक किया, और अगली बार से आपको वह शब्द सही मिलेगा।

हम प्रष्ट्भूमी में machine learning technology इस्तेमाल करके आपको सबसे उत्तम transliteration देते हैं। इस तरह से, आप अपने लिखने और अपने आप को express करने पर ध्यान दे सकते हैं, ऐसी भाषा में जो आपके दिल के पास है। तो हो जाइए creative, इसे try कीजिये, और यहाँ discuss कीजिये। हमें उम्मीद है आपको इसे इस्तेमाल करने में उतना ही मज़ा आएगा, जितना कि हमें इसे बनाने में आया है!

नोटिस: ये translation लेखक मनीष ने गूगल कि original post से अपने हिंदी भाईयों के लिए किया है, इस उम्मीद में कि यह useful होगा। यदि इस translation में कुछ गड़बड़ हो तो लेखक क्षमा याचना करता है।

New Flickrfs release v1.3.9

After some long time, I again had a chance to work upon my favourite filesystem after reiserfs, flickrfs. This release doesn't add nice cool features, this one is targeted towards robustness, resource utilization and efficiency. The previous versions of flickrfs had various issues, namely:

• Slow internet connection, time-outs or other errors, would grind flickrfs to a halt; forbidding it to download information about sets, and stream.
• If the number of images grow, in order of thousands, flickrfs would start consuming tons of RAM and eventually swap space; and would literally make my old thinkpad R40 crash.
• Retrieval of full metadata information for each image was time and network resource consuming, and mostly not required.
• Sometimes flickr response would return error, even if the uploading of image succeeds, making flickrfs generate false error report; and confusing the end-user, who would then end up uploading the same image twice. (confusing huh? ;-))
• For developers, a.k.a. me, flickrfs code was huge, all in one file, with lot of boilerplate code sections.

This version v1.3.9 of flickrfs tackles all these issues (also see features list):

1. Robustness - Flickr operations, as in, interactions with flickr server are now fail-safe. flickrfs handles the URLError exceptions thrown by the operation, checks its result, and retries the operation multiple times in case of failure. Thus, even if connection is lost temporarily, flickrfs would continue its operations unaffected.
2. Efficiency - flickrfs retrieves the sets information in parallel, background threads. Hence, the directory structure is created quickly, allowing users to start working. If some sets couldn't be retrieved the first time, they'd be taken care of when *syncing* kicks in. Secondly, full metadata information of images would only be retrieved when asked for; though they'll always be listed in the directory. Its just like the way flickrfs handles images.
   
3. Resource Saving - flickrfs would now store the image information in Berkeley db database, instead of storing it in memory. Let come millions of images, flickrfs would still consume only negligible amounts of RAM; regarding hard disk space, it would be in 10s of Megabytes; not an issue for today's computers.
4. Refactoring of code - Developers, again a.k.a. me, the code is now divided into 3 different files and... wait! hmm.. you shouldn't care about it. Just know that its more beautiful :-).

So, just give it a whirl. I'm sure you'd like it. More about flickrfs on its homepage.