pictureGallery

An individual picture viewer written in Java.

Main Ideas for this Tool

• show and manage large collections of images with commands by pressing keys on the keyboard (most useful for desktop)
• in particular, move rejected images into another folder instead of deleting them
• pre-load images for showing them faster (important for huge images on slow hard disks)
• no preconditions for the current structure of folders and images to work on

Supported Features

• analyze file system: searches for images, no persistence required
• show picture(s) in configurable orders
• move current picture into another folder
• link current picture for another folder
• commands by keyboard only
• full screen mode
• real and linked pictures/images (use links to real images to mark them for easy access)
• real and linked collections/folders (use links to real collections to mark them for easy access)
• temporary collection which are recursively nestable (for comparing images which are not "neighbored")
• search for duplicated real pictures
  • of the current collection in the (recursive) sub-collections, or
  • within the current collection
  • to replace them by linked pictures, or
  • to delete them
• image caching and pre-loading with fixed size memory consumption
• show some meta data of images
• fix names of multiple images at once

How to start the pictureGallery

1. Get the sourcecode: git clone https://github.com/JohannesMeierSE/pictureGallery.git
2. cd pictureGallery/picturegallery
3. Use Maven to

• directly start the picture viewer with mvn javafx:run (recommended option), or to
• create an executable JAR with the steps (TODO: check this)
  1. mvn jfx:jar
  2. java -jar target/jfx/app/picturegallery-jfx.jar, or to
• create a native bundle with mvn jfx:native

Used Technology

• Java 11
• JavaFX as GUI framework
• some more JavaFX widgets created by the ControlsFX project: http://fxexperience.com/controlsfx/
• EMF for data representation
  • EMF files: picturegallery/src/main/resources/model
  • image of the ECore model: picturegallery/src/main/resources/model/classdiagram.jpg
  • generated sourcecode (started by hand, not by Maven): picturegallery/src-gen/main/java
• Apache Tika for reading meta data of image files
• jpHash for image comparison: https://github.com/pragone/jphash
• Maven as build tool

Technical Design Decisions

• JavaFX was chosen in order to become more familiar with it, since it is the recommended technology to create Java GUIs, to try to create a JavaFX GUI without FXML, and to investigate alternative widgets (ControlsFX).
• EMF was chosen as an experiment to test, if it is possible to use EMF as stand-alone application managed by Maven without Eclipse GUI.
• Maven was chosen to be independent from the used IDE.