tagoSearch Release

With Tagosphere PC you can store photos and meta data from Flickr to the PC. The result looks like a web page. (It is an XML file which uses an XSL style sheet to display its content like HTML).

The data is saved, but how to find it?

The new program tagoSearch does it (Open Source, GPL). The program searches for the saved files and loads the names of tags, sets and groups into a database.

It is possible to search and browse for tags. The number behind each tag shows how many photos you have on your PC for this tag. The tags are sorted by count for better display.

Elements of the tagoSearch program:

1) The toolbar.

History buttons: next / prior list or photo.

Search for a tag

Help

Program end

Monthly news

2) Photo list

A list of photos shown as Item Cards for the current selection. An Item Card shows a thumbnail with some additional information like: name, author and tags

3) Selection tree

Select photos using top 10 tags or some dates

4) Status bar

Shows the number of photos currently found in the database.

The program is hosted on SourceForge.

The download page is here: http://www.tagosphere.org/download.htm

Tagosphere PC version 0.5 is on Sourceforge

One month ago I have released a first version of the Flickr photo copy program on Sourceforge, Version 0.5. This is the project page

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tagosphere/

The home page is here http://www.tagosphere.org

I have named the program Tagosphere, because it’s a program with an emphasis on ‘tags’.

It’s a small program for win32 written in Delphi. The compiled program with an installer und a small help file is less than 1 MB.

When you browse on the web and the Tagosphere program is running at the same time, you see a small window. Copy is only possible from the Flickr detail page.

With the browser on a Flickr Photo page Tagosphere shows you a preview what it would save to your PC: the photo and some of the metadata on the Flickr page.

You could save the picture from the browser, but the default filename is e.g. 380173234_dd6a416343

You could save the whole web page from the browser, but then you have one large photo and dozens of icons and other small pictures and a bunch of html text. You can look at the web page, but searching for data is difficult.

Tagosphere saves data as xml. The browser can show this data as a web page with a small template (an XSLT template). The browser shows the xml file e.g. like this. No additional program is required.

1 Click Save

I want a small program to save the current photo from Flickr which I see in the browser together with related data describing the photo.
I’m not interested in any kind of mass downloader, I have enough not yet seen pictures on my HD.

Save should be as simple as possible – a one–click–save.
I don’t want to select a directory each time and I don’t want to enter a file name each time.

The default Save stores the photo to some directory and uses the photo name as filename, at least as far as possible in Windows. There are a lot of characters which can’t be used for Windows filenames.

The photo will be stored as Jpeg file
The extracted metadata will be stored as XML file.
From the XML file it is easy to generate a local HTML file with XSLT. How the local HTML file will look like is independent from the copy program and depends on the XSL and CSS files. The first layout will be similar to the Flickr page, but can be changed by someone with knowledge in HTML, XSLT and CSS.

A copy will provide three files:
1) The photo as image file
2) The metadata as XML file and
3) The local HTML file which combines photo and data.

Oops!... I Can’t Find It Again

I use Flickr since a couple of months, http://www.flickr.com/. It is fantastic how many beautiful and interesting photos are around there. Everyone can upload digital photos, registration is free. Standard users with a free account can upload pictures for 100 MB a month. Upload for Pro users is unlimited.

There are now more than 1 billion photos on Flickr.

Photography is one of my hobbies – I have a Canon EOS 300D - and I know that it’s often difficult and requires a lot of time and sometimes luck to make a good shot.

So when I see a very good shot on Flickr I sometimes load it to my PC.

Easy:

On the photo page: Mouse – right click – save picture as… click on Save – the photo is saved.

On the Photo Download page: Click download link – Save – Save as – Save – Done

Task fulfilled.

Really?

…No.

Partially at best

I have one photo on my harddisc, that’s all. Everything else which makes Flickr so fascinating is lost.

No description, no tags, no comments.

Who has taken this picture and where and when?

Which camera was used?

Is there a different size of this picture?

Can I used this photo for something else or does it have a copyright?

I don’t know.

And I can’t find out.

Lost in Flickr space.

Sometimes I can find a picture again.

If I can use concise words to describe the photo

and those words appear in photo description or tags

and not too many photos are found

and I have some time to browse through the results

and the web isn’t too slow

and I’m on-line.

All in all it’s a rare event.

What are the alternatives?

a) I could save the whole web page from the browser with: File -> Save as:

The photo is then in a subdirectory to the local web page – together with dozens of other small images and icons. This is not useful; I have only very seldom saved web pages from the browser.

If it does work at all. Sometimes I get a message ‘Error Saving Web Page’ with Internet Explorer.

b) I could set a bookmark to the page. I have a bookmark to the Flickr home page, but not to single photos. Large numbers of bookmarks are confusing.

c) I could copy the photo and some data from a Flickr Photo Page selectively. There are hundreds of Flickr utilities. A great list is here

http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/03/great-flickr-tools-collection/

I have looked through this list and found some interesting utilities. A few programs copy photos to the PC, e.g. as mass downloader. But I have not found a program to copy one picture and the related meta data.

No problem for me, I'm a software developer.

I will write a little utility to copy one photo and meta data from Flickr to a PC