ImageServer 0.5

ImageServer is a software for maintaining archives of images. Theres much software available to manually view, categorize and search images. ImageServer was designed to solve a different problem:
Imagine being a photographer or photo agency: You have a lot of images in many formats, all stored in a directory structure - your archive.
This creates at least two problems:
- The archive may contain different images with the same name. What do you do when a customer orders "flowers.tif" and this name exists in twenty different subfolders in your archive?
- The customer doesnt need your original 22megapixel 16-bit tiff file for his powerpoint presentation or layouting, he wants a small jpeg instead.
The first problem can be managed by assigning unique names to images every time an image is put into the archive.
The second problem is a little more difficult. Youll have to convert the requested images to smaller JPEGs. After doing that for too many times, you start caching the small JPEGs so you wont have to convert again for the next customer asking for that image. But then, you edit the original image and forget to update the JPEGs. Furthermore, its not enough to keep these resized jpegs for presentations, your customers graphics department also wants correctly downsampled eps images for layouting advertisements in QuarkXPress. So you start having two slaveArchives - one with JPEG and one with EPS images - and spend half of your day trying to synchronize the three.
ImageServer solves both problems automatically. It is a program with a nice GUI, configured to watch your masterArchive. As soon as images are put into any subfolder, theyll be assigned unique names if necessary. Afterwards, each image is read, and for each defined slaveArchive, a preview is created and saved. The same happens when an image in the masterArchive is altered. All this works completely automatically, theres nothing youll have to do; the GUI is just for being able to watch whats happening.
Main features:
- Input file checking: as soon as an image is put into the archive, ImageServer checks the extension to see whether it really is an image. If not, it is put into a specified folder outside of the archive.
- If configured to do so, an image without a suiting name is assigned a new name which is constructed of both the subfolders it resides in and a unique-per-subfolder serial number of arbitrary length.
- When detecting a change in the masterArchive, ImageServer can play a sound.
- When starting to convert an image, ImageServer can play a sound.
- ImageServer can remember the names it has already assigned to images in the past. This way, names assigned to an image A will never be assigned to another image B after A has been deleted.
- Any number of slaveArchives can be defined, and they can be in any location.
- Each defined slaveArchive can have completely different settings for the images that will populate it. Resizing or resampling? RGB or CMYK? Jpeg, EPS, PNG or TIFF?
- You can choose whether each slaveArchive should inherit the exact same directory structure from the masterArchive or whether the slaveArchives images should all be put into the same folder.
- In case dazuko missed something, you can tell imageserver to manually look into a folder. It can then either process all images in that folder or only those where slaveArchive-images are missing.