PictureGo!

Version 8.0 - October 2018

Though the development of PictureGo! 8.0 started with importing pictures from a usb-device (in essence a flashcard), this was not the major improvement that lead to a new major release. In fact, back then I intended on release 7.7.

And yet again it was. Let me explain. I wanted a little more than only importing image files. For starters, I realized that it was important to import all image files regardless of the extension, so also al kind of video files but also raw images. In short any file regardless of the fact whether it was supported by PictureGo! or not.

Support for raw images

It started with the fact that I wanted some support in PictureGo! for raw images. PictureGo! will not display raw images but when accompanied by a jpg image, you can have some control over raw images. You can edit a raw image but you can also have it copied to a backup folder provided you use PictureGo !'s Flickr backup feature.

A little more organization

After that I wanted some features regarding organizing your pictures. So instead of having your pictures to be moved to a folder per year/month (which Windows offers), it needed to be possible to organize per year/month/day but also use the characteristic of your flash card. Simply, have pictures of a certain flash card end up in a different folder than those from another flash card. Or to put it on a more personal level: pictures that were taken by my wife end up in a different folder than my pictures.

(Do I take better pictures than my wife? Sometimes but not absolutely not always. But at least one can say : these are all your/my pictures).

Yet, this was not enough. Wat good will it do to have a folder named 'Judy's card\2019-09-30'. What is in it? Unless it it a familiar date with a distinct meaning, you would have no idea. That's why I thought of having an intermediate window to add descriptions to folders upon creation. After all, It is the best time for it. You can rename folders after the fact, but the sooner the better so creating an occasion for it it would the best thing to do.

And now we are coming up to the fact that his version is a major release. In order to provide a meaningful name to the folder, you need to know what is in it. So, thumbnails need to be provided.

The techinical challenge for me was that regardless of the fact whether 1000 pictures needed to be displayed of such a folder or just 10, it needed to be equally as fast without any memory issues.

Thumbnails

Once I had accomplished that, I realized this was the time to redesign PictureGo!'s main interface dramatically to have thumbnails displayed for a folder or a MyShow file that was opened.

There was a little more at stake here: the thumbnails should reflect the order that can be changed in a MyShow file and refreshing should automatically take place after editing pictures. But ok, these are details, nevertheless quite important details.

I am truly happy with the result! PictureGo!, although being possible to run at full screen for quite a few major versions, now runs by default in full screen mode. The fact that PictureGo! already created thumbnails in a pretty high quality, now really pays off. Should you select a folder from a relatively slow network drive, PictureGo! automatically switches to lower quality thumbnails derived from the picture itself.

A new web site

And then the real difficult part: the web site. In the past I have purchased a software package named Microsoft Expression Web. Before that I was using FrontPage from the same supplier. Microsoft Expression Web offered a real visual way of developing which turned out to be a nightmare. Courses that I discovered afterward, pretty much started with one direction: do not use the visual interface. But I did want to have a new web site! What I did was take a sample web site and adjust it bit by bit. Maybe it is not the best but in my opinion it looks quite decent. (And CSS can be such a bitchJ)

PictureGo! is alive and kicking, and my intention is to keep it that way!

Auke Nijholt