GPixPod

With this release it is now possible to manually force own iPod model from command line and configuring it in preferences for GUI. Full resolution images options have been simplified, moved straight to the filechooser, where new options have been added, to scan directories recursively and to check for duplicates.
Many other bugs and exception have been fixed, for example to handle storing large amount of photos.
To users having problems with GUI (incomplete, with some missing parts): the problems were related to wrong Glade dependencies!!! Minimum python-glade2 version should be 2.8+ and now packages are updated to depend on this.
Thanks go for good testing by Marcos Rodriguez who integrates always the latest GPixPod release into his new Gentoo-based distro Aris OS!

In GPixPod 0.5.0 I have added different behaviours (fit, zoom and stretch) for storing the thumbnails when uploading images on your iPod, which you could choose both globally with a redesigned preferences dialog and per image from the filechooser. “Fit” is the default behaviour used by GPixPod until now, “Zoom” is what iTunes uses most of the time, and “Stretch” is just there for completeness, since you don’t really want to forget about ratio.
GPixPod 0.5.0 introduces a new basic command line interface that is activated automatically simply passing option to gpixpod, /usr/lib/gpixpod/gpixpod.py or /usr/lib/gpixpod/gpixpod_cli.py. Please either look at the manual page or launch gpixpod –help to get explanation of the options with details; don’t use any option to start GPixPod normally with the regular GTK graphical user interface.
Using the new CLI interface you could also take advantage of a new basic synchronization possibility, that automatically avoids to upload again images already stored on your iPod, checking filenames already processed by the script.
This release provides better packaging in both python and debian ways, and other fixes, too.

iPod Nano and Video users who got problems, crashes, failure when trying to open the Photo Database: please upgrade to the new 0.4.4 version and report if now is finally working for you. This fix updates the parser code so that it now should handle properly Photo Database files generated on Macs, probably by iPhoto and containing some extra irregular fields.
This release includes also a new iPod info dialog, showing the detected model and storage statistics, from the help menu.
Download from SF!

I am currently working on Photo Database format differences found on recent Apple iPod Nanoes and maybe Video, too.
I don’t know whether these discrepancies - which until now caused GPixPod crashes - are generated only by iPhoto when used to do anything with the iPod, or by some versions of iTunes, too.
Well, I don’t know, but I’ll try to manage this transparently. It’s not something the user should worry about, whether to use iPhoto or not.
For instance, this kind of Photo Databases stores a second string entry in every photo album, after its name, containing a transition effect name (as already documented on the iPodLinux wiki) but also additional string records for every image, containing a label or the name maybe as shown inside iPhoto (I don’t know yet whether instead of the path, or indipendently).
I’m going to update the specifications on the iPodLinux.org wiki and the parser code to handle all this hopefully to finally support the interested users.
Stay tuned!

I have just released 0.4.3 version of GPixPod that should fix the fullscreen image behaviour for iPod Photo/Color models! Please test it and report how it is working now, both on the iPod itself and in the application, in the right pane thumbnails view!
This release introduces more refined graphics with a simpler icon and a better logo, too. It fixes also the handling of iPodLinux installations, avoiding querying them for photos and Photo Database.
Download

Photo references actually are just links to existing photos inside photo albums. Think of a photo album as a list of links to the pictures: GPixPod before could manage only one link per each picture; now it handles multiple links in different places. For example you could want a photo to show up in two or three different photo albums, or maybe you just want to include it both at the beginning and at the end of a same photo album. Now it’s possible to achieve this, first adding the photo as usually, and then choosing the Add Photo Reference action in the interested photo album specifying the related photo ID.

The implementation of threads in GPixPod allows for a faster processing when adding photos, opening and saving Photo Database, specially on multi-core / multi-processors machines; thanks to this, a very detailed progress indication is available now when opening and saving the Photo Database and the related thumbnails files.

With GPixPod 0.4.2 it is also possible to stop/abort pre-saving operations such as adding/deleting photos, renaming photo albums, etc. etc. any time, just pressing the new button on the right of the progress bar. The status remains unsaved for not completed operations which could be continued later, choosing to save again.

Please download it from SF as usually! (Debian users: try again the .deb package, it should install cleanly now!)

The main home page of GPixPod is now here at the new hosting www.gpixpod.org. The wiki is at http://www.gpixpod.org/wiki. Please update your bookmarks!

Developers are welcome to reimplement in their own projects every piece of code of GPixPod, giving credit of course . Code of particular interest for iPod photos management includes the Photo Database file format access module mh.py and image conversions functions of the file imgconvs.py.

I have published the complete API reference to the mh.py module plus additional info for developers here. The lasted code is available on SF SVN, browsable clicking here.

I have just released GPixPod 0.4.1 with the following enhancements and bugfixes:

• Blazing-fast opening with thumbs checksum instead of copy
• Thumbs update on saving; extracting only on checksum fail
• Option to choose where thumbnails cache should be kept
• Speed-up in some RGB565 functions using operator module
• Some speed-up when open/save in extract/rebuild thumbs
• Fixed treeview when selecting an album for the first time
• Fixed addition/removal/display of photos with accented or other not ASCII characters
• Fixed cross-platform pack/unpack specifying little-endian
• Maybe it now supports the latest model, iPod Nano 1Gb

Starting from GPixPod 0.4.0 I’m actually developing using SVN on SourceForge. Thus, if you wish to get the latest unreleased code, you could check out it with the command:
svn checkout https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gpixpod/trunk gpixpod-cvs