VitaminSEE Feed

VitaminSEE 0.7.2

2009-01-24T00:00:00-08:00

With version 0.7.2, I’m abandoning VitaminSEE. The code is available on github and there’s now a site for VitaminSEE. I hope that someone forks the code and continues it.

VitaminSEE 0.7.2 is an odd assortment of bug fixes that I’ve accumulated over the years of my own use. The only new user visible feature (that I remember!) is proper unicode sorting on the file list.

VitaminSEE v0.7.2 (Universal Binary)
VitaminSEE v0.7.2 Source

VitaminSEE 0.7.1.2

2006-03-30T00:00:00-08:00

This build fixes a number of memory leaks in VitaminSEE, where memory wasn’t being freed when a window was closed, thus causing VitaminSEE to consume a large amount of memory over a long session.

VitaminSEE v0.7.1.2 (Universal Binary)
VitaminSEE v0.7.1.2 (for 10.3.x)
VitaminSEE v0.7.1.2 Source

7 Comments

Sergiu Partenie | 01-Apr-06 at 1:31 am | Permalink

Full screen interface.
Very nice - but a Aperture-type gray pallete for the menus would look much better imho.

And another request - an option that will only display 64×64 thimbnails in the thumbnail pane - the default ones are too big for smaller (800×600) displays
Kerry | 18-Apr-06 at 5:04 am | Permalink

Tried it out. But wish I could have the option of displaying PDFs as thumbnails.
Deb | 01-May-06 at 9:15 am | Permalink

Love your application but how do I view my portrait (vertical) shots? They are rotated in the thumbnail and they are rotated images but VitaminSEE doesn’t recognize or display verticals in the viewer. Is there something I’m missing here? Thank you! Deb
glaysher | 02-May-06 at 4:47 am | Permalink | Edit

Deb, this sounds like a bug. Could you please email me (one) of these images, so I can figure out what’s going on for the next version?
Matt | 01-Aug-06 at 1:14 am | Permalink

Hi, great software. One observation: there doesn’t seem to be any way to control the default window size: every time I open an image it defaults to a (relatively) small window, and the image shrunk to fit it. Even if I enlarge the window, the next time I launch VitaminSEE it’s small again.

I’d love to see 1) an option to “remember this window size” for future launches, and 2) an option for “view at Actual Size” by default, which is usually what I want (unless the image is larger than my screen).

Thanks!
Wyatt | 24-Dec-06 at 8:12 pm | Permalink

Excellent program! It looks to be exactly what I was looking for - a graphical interface which allows tagging of images, before I run my archiving scripts on them. A couple of comments:

1) I notice the same problem as Deb: vertical images are not properly rotated. My camera includes the rotation information in the metadata. Most applications recognise this (Finder, Preview, iPhoto, etc) this and flip the photo accordingly, but VitaminSee does not seem to do so.

2) Keyword tagging only seems to work for .jpg; it does not seem to work for .raw (specifically, Olympus RAW: .orf), and .png. I don’t know if this is a limitation with the Exif2 library or the interface. This is not a huge problem, but it would be nice.

3) I can consistently crash the program by doing the following:
a) Open preferences, and edit Keywords
b) Click on a tag (to edit the name)
c) Click on Remove

Regardless, this is a very nice program which does exactly what I need. Thank you very much!
Kado | 27-Mar-07 at 6:00 am | Permalink

Great: simple and efficient!

Do you (or someone else) work on VitaminSEE? Please tell me Yes ;-)

Memory Usage

2006-03-30T00:00:00-08:00

So, later tonight, I’ll be making a release of VitaminSEE that should fix most of the current memory leaks, so I can go off and make new ones for the next version.

But right now, I want to talk about the conditions under which VitaminSEE consumes ridiculous amounts of memory (which won’t be fixed in this release). You may have noticed that on folders with a large number of image files, VitaminSEE will consume really large amounts of memory.

For example, I have an “Unsorted” folder with 1,666 images in it. VitaminSEE starts from a resting memory position of 8 megabytes. After giving VitaminSEE a few moments to load all the thumbnails, Activity Monitor tells me that VitaminSEE is using 25 megs of real memory. Not optimal, but more then acceptable. After scrolling from the first file in the folder to the last file, VitaminSEE’s memory consumption jumps all the way up to 122 megabytes. Note that it already had the thumbnails in memory before the jump.

From what I can make out from MallocDebug, it appears that the implementation of either NSBrowser or NSMatrix in Cocoa render their contents into an NSImage offscreen, and then copy that cached version onto the screen.

Solving this will require me to do one of the two things:

Find a magic way to tell whatever class is at fault to not cache things this way (Quick, unlikely)
Look at other controls and see if I can coerce them to do what I want to do.
Write my own control that doesn't do things this way. (Hard, would take a long time)

VitaminSEE 0.7.1.2 Beta

2006-03-28T00:00:00-08:00

The entire 0.7 series of VitaminSEE has had a string of severe memory leaks. This build hopes to address most of them. It contains no new features; it is purely a bugfix build.

This is a beta build; the final version will be released in two days if no serious problems are found with it. Please leave a comment if you find a defect (that isn’t present in previous builds). Please do NOT submit this build to the release announcement sites.

Old links removed.

VitaminSEE 0.7.1.1

2006-03-22T00:00:00-08:00

VitaminSEE 0.7.1.1 is a bugfix release that fixes two issues with VitaminSEE 0.7.1:

When I upgraded to IconFamily 0.9.1, I forgot to port my changes that would restore a file’s modification date. Fix this so building a thumbnail of a file does set the modification date.
Back/Forward will now focus on the file/folder you were on previously, instead of always starting at the beginning of the list.

Old links removed.

VitaminSEE 0.7.1

2006-03-21T00:00:00-08:00

I have just released VitaminSEE 0.7.1, after three betas and a lot of testing. The product page has been updated. As always, thanks go to B. Star for testing and Hiroto Sakai for the updated translation.

What's new:

Upgrade IconFamily to 0.9.1
Make rename sheet handle extensions like the Save... dialogs do
Add a fullscreen mode
Don't display document types that OSX treats as images, such as postscript files, and PDFs.

Old links removed.

3 Comments

Paul Russo | 21-Mar-06 at 8:41 pm | Permalink

Hi Elliot,

I’m sorry to give negative feedback about something that you have apparently given so much thought and work to, but here it is.

VitaminSEE 0.7.1 destroys data.

When VitaminSEE automatically creates the thumbnail, it also automatically changes the file modification date. This is a big problem, because the date when I last modified a picture is important data about that picture.

I knew this might happen, so right after I launched VitaminSEE I went straight to the preferences to turn the thumbnailing off. Of course, I was too slow. By then VitaminSEE had already started thumbnailing and changing the modification dates. Luckily I backed up yesterday. Others might not be so lucky.

This is a common problem in early versions of other thumbnailing programs. It’s not just you.

This didn’t have to happen. It is possible for VitaminSEE to change the modification date back to what it was originally after it creates the thumbnail. Resetting the modification date back to what it was originally is standard behavior in thumbnailing programs because of this issue.

Thanks for listening.

Paul
glaysher | 21-Mar-06 at 9:39 pm | Permalink

Actually, this is the second time I’ve fixed this bug.

VitaminSEE uses a third party library called IconFamily to do the thumbnailing. I had to fix it in the previous version IconFamily, and I completely forgot to port my changes up IconFamily 0.9.1 when I updated. I just submitted a patch upstream this time, so hopefully something like this won’t happen a third time.

In any case, could you please try the following build? I believe I’ve fixed the problem:

(Beta links removed, since 0.7.1.1 final is out.)

As for negative feedback? Don’t worry about it. Unlike quite a bit of criticism I get, yours was at least constructive.
Paul Russo | 22-Mar-06 at 1:32 am | Permalink

Hi Elliot,

VitaminSEE 0.7.1.1-beta.dmg does the trick. The date/time is now preserved when the thumbnails are added.

Thanks for the quick response :)

Paul

Duplicate Image Algorithms

2006-03-19T00:00:00-08:00

GQView was my favorite image viewer on Linux, and a high quality image duplicate finder is the only feature that VitaminSEE lacks that I miss from GQView. I’ve already started thinking beyond 0.7.2 to the big feature of 0.8: Duplicate image search, like in GQview. I wasn’t sure what the algorithm in gqview was, so I finally stumbled upon this page which outlines a few image comparison implementations.

GQView looks like the simplest algorithm: It subdivides the image into a 32 x 32 grid, and then takes the average pixel color of each block. The difference is simply the sum of the difference between each block in the two images, normalized to a value between 0 and 1. The similar.c code in GQView is really that simple. I’m surprised that I got such good results back when I used it. Unless I find something better, I’m guessing that this is going to be the base algorithm, after I figure out how GQView scales with it to deal with hundreds (thousands?) of files.

And after 0.7.2 is released, of course.

Mission Statement

2006-03-11T00:00:00-08:00

I’ve broken down and started a real website. My previous “website” was a ten minute job that I created as an afterthought to comply with the one rule of the UM Cocoa Codeoff ‘05 that stated that I had to have a website.

This is going to be different. This website is going to be functional, usable, and something I’ll be proud to associate my name with.

This domain will be used for/will contain:

Random thoughts on programming
Hosting of the VitaminSEE page, its Subversion repository, and the Trac that does wiki and bug management.
Random life things
Everything else I think of