Development Plans

If you wish to request a new feature, please add it to the bug tracker. If there is a feature listed here with an accompanying bug number, please add your vote of support so it may get done sooner. Or better yet, undertake it yourself. :)

If you really want a certain feature implemented, you may need to scratch our back a bit to bump it higher on the priority list..

These features currently exist only in the development tree. As they are backported, they will disappear from this list and appear on the Stable Changelog page, where they will accumulate until the next release. If there is something you wish to get backported sooner rather than later, leave comments in the appropriate bug ticket or on the mailing list.

A demo site running the latest -devel code can be found at http://po.shaftnet.org/po-devel-demo/. This is not considered stable enough for production, and as such may have unknown bugs and incomplete features. That said, the maintainer runs his personal site (http://www.shaftnet.org/po/) on the same code, so any problems get sorted out quickly.

Download 2.36-rc2 GPG Signature (SHA1SUM c75d93f0e4a46bb9b03fb4bd04c7f46e66cf3c98)

• [fix] Account status messages weren't always including a valid 'bulk upload' status. 352
• [fix] Editing an existing lens/flash/filter/scanner/support failed. 350
• [fix] Minor tweak to the installer.
• [misc] Display the serial number of equipment, as users may have multiple cameras, lenses, etc of the same type.
• [add] Support importing XMP sidecar files. 292
• [add] Make the metadata import order into a preference. 357
• [fix] Don't allow duplicate keywords on import.
• [lang] de_DE updates (Marcus Hinz)
• [fix] XMP now imports 'Description' field as 'caption' (Marcus Hinz)
• [fix] Admin users weren't seeing the full manufacturer, location, and label lists. 361
• [fix] Tag cloud/search pages now respect the global 'masters_only' preference. 362
• [fix] Error in the Italian translation 366
• [add] Link the location string to Google Maps too 364
• [fix] Minor fix for GraphicsMagick users 365
• [misc] Upon successful login, jump to the 'my folders' page unless we have a better idea where to return to.
• [add] Optionally use memcache to cache static data.
• [fix] Fixed a suboptimal query in photo.php. Over 30x faster on my system! 298

Download 2.36-rc1 GPG Signature (SHA1SUM 33ad9d663eeb883fb407d42334c265ed45b8fab8)

• [misc] Files on disk now include their version id in the filename.
• [misc] Support a second ad script per-page, in the footer.
• [misc] Allow for file count limits on volumes 246
• [misc] Allow usernames to be specified instead of userids.
• [add] Folders/Albums now have an associated 'thumbnail' image.
• [add] Display the filename instead of 'no title'. 324
• [add] 'Blackwater' theme, by Rickard Olsson. (with modifications) 303
• [misc] Theme cleanups and fixes/tweaks to CSS rules.
• [misc] Allow for a cookie path to make it easier to share installations on the same host.
• [add] Allow user to specify default copyright/web statement. 326
• [misc] lists of focal lengths, apertures, resolutions, etc are now configurable. 329
• [misc] Support 'pretty URLs' for outward-facing things like images, folders, and albums. 302
• [misc] Move folder and user searches to their own pages.
• [fix] Many bugs relating to external authentication.
• [add] A new auth backend, designed to tie into an external database.
• [misc] Convert the select all/select none button into a 'toggle selection' button.
• [add] Configurable per-user local filesystem bulk uploads. 319
• [misc] Unify lens, filter, flash, scanner, and support equipment tables, allow for multiple of each type. 171 204 328
• [fix] Made the XML import/export better match the DTD.
• [misc] Removed the rather broken (and useless) XML converter.
• [misc] Consolidated a few php files.
• [fix] Album adding was broken. (Scott Petersen)

• [fix] EXIF Focal Length detection was failing on some digicams. (Scott Petersen)
• [misc] Revamp the keyword set/clear form elements.
• [fix] Errors in the admin user mangling pages.
• [misc] Unify all photo removal code. Make user removals two-phase.
• [fix] External DB auth was getting an extra space.
• [misc] Ensure all forms are submitted using UTF-8 encoding.
• [add] Datebook events now have an associated location. 317
• [fix] Photo rotation was broken.
• [add] Allow the RAW preview image to beimproted as the master. 336
• [fix] Lower set of navigation buttons wasn't working on advanced search page. 339
• [fix] Selection toggle isn't working on search result pages 338
• [fix] Album deletion was returning to the wrong page at times.
• [misc] Allow guests to view technical details of an image, but not the full exif dumps.
• [misc] Remove the 'front page editor' as it's a security hole. If the admin user doesn't have write permissions to the PO filesystem, they shouldn't be allowed to modify the start page.
• [fix] Add a warning for users that have the FunWebProducts toolbar installed, as it sends bogus requests to the PO server.
• [fix] Improper retorting of the photos in trash.
• [add] Display keywords in the tooltips. 340
• [add] Display link to Google Maps for all geolocation tags. 337
• [fix] Advanced search on location was broken.
• [add] Added a crude LDAP authentication backend. It'll need customization before it's usable. 331
• [fix] IPTC import code was ignoring 'sub-location' field. 348
• [add] Added a tag cloud, and easy browsing by tag/keyword. 133

This list consists of longer-term projects/goals which are generally made up of sub-tasks. All of these tasks are listed individually in the bug tracker. Please make new feature requests there.

This list also reflects the personal interests of the developers. There is no set schedule or roadmap for feature implementation, but incentives are certainly appreciated.

We have the original Aqua and a dark derivative (Blackwater) of it, but more, different, themes would be nice.

There are lots of little enhancements to the UI I'd like to make, including the use of DHTML to speed up page loads (for the photo page tabs in particular), easy selection between multiple photo versions and image sizes, a scrollable list of images on the photo display page, “what's new” lists, a better system for bulk-tagging images, nicer photo slide frames, etc, etc…

Ideally we could adjust the RAW settings on a per-image basis, and allow regeneration based on the stored settings. There's actually a lot of work involved here. 6 It would also be nice to allow users to add custom image processing pipelines. (eg sharpen,crop,add a custom border,shadow,user-specified text…).

We currently support three sizes, thumbnail (170), preview (700), and “original”. It would be quite nice if we could support additional sizes, such as (350) and (1050), for example, and also host a full-res jpeg image derived from RAW sources. 7. It would be even nicer if this could be customized on a per-user basis. The backend plumbing is already complete, but as always, the frontend and especially UI hve a long way to go. 160 176 180

There are many ways we can improve both the speed and functionality of Photo Organizer's searching features, including caching of results, allowing searches of every stored field, and sub-searches. 89 239

Theoretically, Photo Organizer supports bits of this already, but lacks a search backend (and integration instructions) to actually perform “find images like this one” searches. 100

We already have the means to pull up images between arbitrary date ranges, so all that's left is building cool features on top of this – RSS feeds and pseudo-albums based on date ranges come to mind. 176

Implement some sort of RPC mechanism (XMLRPC/SOAP/JSONRPC/whatever) that allows third-party software to call into PO's backend. There's a lot one can do with this sort of API. (“Give me ten random highly-rated images from user X's collection” “give me all the technical info about this photo” “give me an embedable image+url that I can inline into some CMS system”)

The current permission model is insufficient for many use cases. 8 245 Ideally, we'd be able to specify access rights on a per-user basis, not the current “public,clients-only,private”. This not particularly important for a single-user system, but makes a huge difference for larger deployments that have well-defined roles. (See New Permission Model)

While Photo Organizer will most likely remain PostgreSQL-dependent for the forseeable future, we need to migrate to an abstraction layer (eg PHP:PDO) so that we are not tied to using PostgreSQL's bindings. In the process, we will rewrite all transactions using lazily-bound parameters to completely eliminate any possiblilty of future SQL injection problems. 11 Additionally, there are other database-level cleanups that need performing. 201 204 210. This will require PHP 5.1.0 or newer.

We have the means to authenticate against an external system, and sample LDAP and external database support. Down the line, we should look into tying into a single-sign-on solution like OpenID and/or integration into CMS systems (eg Drupal).