Photo support for TagLib#
Together with Mike Gemünde (tigger), I am happy to announce that we are working on adding image support to Taglib#, which is the metadata library used by Banshee and currently only supports audio and video files. So why is this important? Because we will be able to vastly improve the metadata handling inside F-Spot. Furthermore, should Banshee ever decide to add photo support. it’ll be ready for them to use.
The aim is to have a usable, complete and solid metadata library. This includes extensive unit testing (to the extreme). If we will handle your files, we want to guarantee that it will be done correctly.
All of this can be found on Gitorious. The code is in the photo-support branch of the mainline repository, master is a copy of the SVN repository for upstream Taglib#. Currently we support JPEG and TIFF, with Exif and XMP (see the wiki for more details). We plan to expand this to every other format out there. More instructions on how to get the code and test it can be found here.
So what’s the plan here? First, we will improve the git version as is. When it is ready, we will then start embedding it into the F-Spot tree (while keeping the main repository synced in gitorious), to let it mature. Over time, we’ll be working with upstream to have it merged back. I have already talked with Gabriel Burt about this, so this “fork” won’t stay around forever.
We are looking for people that want to help us out. By testing it (to make sure we handle your files correctly) and off-course by hacking on it. Much to my surprise, I noticed that writing a metadata library isn’t all that hard, so you don’t have to be a superhero hacker to be able to do something useful.
Want to help out? Hop onto IRC and join #f-spot (on irc.gnome.org), come and talk to me (rubenv) or Mike (tigger).
Related
- Summer of Code 2009 (September 9, 2009)
- F-Spot 0.6.0 (August 8, 2009)
- F-Spot: Alive and kicking! (June 10, 2009)
- Folders to the side (July 22, 2009)
- A tale about design (July 17, 2009)