GPixPod

GPixPod 0.6.1 is out, featuring new fullscreen display (double-clicking an image on the treeview) and slideshow at regular intervals of 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, or 30 seconds, that you can control also by keys combinations (PageUp or P to get previous pictures, PageDown or N to get next picture, Esc or Q to close). The image displayed will be the full resolution one if available, otherwise the first (bigger) thumbnail image available on the iPod.
You have definitively lost your full resolution pictures? At least you could still save their thumbnails, using the new export menu with the options to save all the thumbnails used on the iPod. To iPod Photo/Color users: this release works OK again as before for you, fixing the problem of the weird full screen iPod image, thanks to William Waghorn, who also provided a patch to get the image date from its EXIF headers if mmpython is available, used when building the path to store the full resolution image.
Users who got a segmentation fault: probably this is caused by the HAL autodetection (happened testing in Ubuntu Edgy), and now it is completely disabled by default. Other fixes include: proper size of the album icon when adding a new one and modified bash script as suggested at bug report #1549407.
Finally, new packages for 0.6.1 depend on python instead of python2.4 related dependencies, and hopefully it should install cleanly on Debian.
Download now!

Probably you have already seen those new iPods: luckly, this software update is available also to existing iPod 5G users by installing iTunes 7. I confirm that GPixPod works fine with this new iPod firmware 1.2.
I have no idea whether it will work flawlessly even with the new Nano rainbow, though

The new 0.6 major release of GPixPod is out, featuring:

• Bottle-neck code (image conversions functions, used every time a photo is added) converted to C for much more speed than before (bit-to-bit operations in Python even using the operator module are so sloooow)!
• Thumbnail files are rebuilt only when really needed: actually when you have deleted one or more photos. When you will only add photos, saving will be much faster (thumbnail parts will be appended, instead of re-written all from scratch!)
• You could almost safely kill the application (both CLI and GUI versions, however Ctrl-c works only with CLI): it will save at the current status!
• When you attempt to save hundreds/thousands of photos, you could need either to pause and resume the upload to the iPod, or to completely stop the operation saving at the current status. Now you could do this with the new behaviours of the buttons near the progress bar.
• New “View” menu to hide/show GUI sections, including thumbnails as previews in the treeview of the list of the photos.
• New “Photo Album” details notebook page.
• Rename album option now also in the “Edit” menu, besides double-click on an album: improves usability.
• New “Rescue” option tries to fix the Photo Database if inconsistent: use this if you end to see nothing more on your iPod Photos section.
• Fixed exceptions, when using sync file from CLI, and when adding photos and thumbnails cache directories are missing (deleted).
• Removed wrong filechooser options when saving images.
• Properly managing special empty database formatted by some versions of iTunes sometimes.
• Made all dialogs modal to avoid multiple instances.
• Some other gettext and GUI clean-ups (ugly borders removed, etc.)

To jkohen and other users who kindly reported bugs recently on SF: this “euphoric” release launchs now completed code, I will release a new maintenance 0.6.1 version shortly trying to fix all those bugs! Thanks for your advices and reports!

Update: new gpixpod_0.6.0-1_i386.deb (use this on Ubuntu Dapper, too! The other .deb is for Edgy) and gpixpod-0.6.0-2.i386.rpm packages!

Finally gaining the really needed (much more) speed converting the bottle-neck code (the image conversion functions module) in C, as compiled extension instead of pure python module.
Some initial benchmarks (iPod video 5G on a Centrino 1,7Ghz with 1Gb of RAM) are telling that image uploading to iPod is from 2x to 4x faster than before, taking approximately 1 second long per image, almost the same of iTunes.
To achieve the best speed, you could choose stretch as image uploading behaviour, autorotation disabled, w/o full resolution image. Of course using Nano iPods the process is always much faster than other iPods, because they use only 2 kinds of thumbnails, instead of the usual 4 types used in Photo/Color/Video iPods.
The new C code is currently in pre-alpha testing phase, and it will be the major feature of the upcoming 0.6 release. Currently, a working version is already in SVN: if you want to try it, check it out and report your feedback!