I’ve released photos 3.5 beta 1. This is the first release under the title ‘photos’ and it is a much needed upgrade to my photo database software, formerly titled ‘gallery’. I’m really pleased to get this release out there, I think people will like it.

There are a bunch of changes in this release, here are some of the biggies:

Browser browser compatability – photos now displays properly in Safari and Mozilla. Sorry it took a while to get this in place, when I wrote ‘gallery’ initially, Mozilla stunk and Safari didn’t exist. Believe it or not, IE had the best DHTML/JavaScript support of the Mac browsers. Anyway, this shouldn’t be a problem in the future.

I’ve made enhancements to the Quick Entry functionality. Now there is a list of the last 20 photos you’ve edited to choose from (to fill the current photo’s data).

A bunch of EXIF info is now saved in the database and I will be adding more robust search functionality (ranges, multi-select) using that data. This should be useful in narrowing down searches.

I’m using Jake Olefsky’s Exifer so that the PHP exif library is no longer required. Lots of people had trouble with this requirement.

I now check to see if someone else has edited a photo you’ve been editing so you don’t stomp on each other’s changes.

I’ve even written up some basic documentation.

Here is a semi-complete list of changes in 3.5b1:

– Renamed from “gallery” to “photos”
– Mozilla/Phoenix/Camino and Safari compatibility
– Numerous UI Enhancements
– Added confirmation messages
– Add Details now feeds you the next photo after you save the current one
– Lots of misc. improvements
– Additional EXIF information (searchable) stored in the database
– Added photographer field
– Database table name is configurable
– Enhanced Quick Entry functionality
– Now uses Jake Olefsky’s Exifer instead of requiring the PHP exif extension
– Date Picker and preset range buttons on the search page
– Many POSTs are now GETs (back/forward buttons work better)
– History button on toolbar
– Create table script makes set-up easier
– search for text across title, description
– add some light versioning support to avoid concurrent user conflicts
– checking for new versions is a preference
– Created some basic documentation

Bug Fixes
– HTML characters are properly escaped
– State field expanded to 50 characters
– Country field expanded to 100 characters

This post is part of the project: Photos. View the project timeline for more context on this post.