Zoph 0.8.0.5 and 0.8.2 released

20 Oct 2010 by jeroen

I have created two new releases for Zoph. The first one is a bug fix release for the stable 0.8 branch. This release fixes six bugs that are not very serious, but could be very annoying. All currently known bugs have been fixed in this release. If you are running a v0.8 or v0.8.0.x release, it is recommended to upgrade to this release.

The other release is Zoph 0.8.2, which is a feature release that offers a preview on the new features for Zoph 0.9. This release introduces a completely rewritten import system. Both the web interface and the CLI interface have been redesigned and almost completely rewritten from scratch. This release is the result of 9 months of development.

The web import system has been the number one cause for problems for many Zoph users. Many users had issues with PHP timers running out and Zoph did not give proper feedback when things went wrong. Also, usability and user-friendliness were outdated. The new web import looks much more up to date than the old one and is based on templates instead of hard coded HTML. You can now upload multiple photos simultaneously and while they are uploading, upload progress is shown.

Zoph no longer tries to resize all photos at the same time, which caused PHP time-outs for a lot of people. Zoph now resizes photos 1 by 1.

Upload and import have been separated, you can now upload multiple photos and then import them separately, so you can set albums and categories different, for example. The old web import allowed only one album and category, now multiple albums and categories during import. For some reason it was never possible to add people to photos from the import screen, this has been corrected.  Preview images of what you have uploaded are shown before your import them.

Zoph now reads lat/lon data from EXIF and can automatically rotate images based on EXIF tags.

The CLI (command line) import utility (zophImport.pl) worked ok for most people, but had one big problem: it was written in Perl and not in PHP, like the rest of Zoph. This caused a lot of development effort every time something needed to be changed in the import system: everything needed to be written twice. A new CLI utility, simply called 'zoph' is introduced in this version. This has been written in PHP, just like the rest of Zoph.

Zoph 0.8.2 is not a stable release. I have tested everything as well as possible, but some rough edges may have been overlooked. If you just want a system that works, you should not install this update and install the v0.8.0.5 release. However, if you are willing to help improve Zoph and help me find those rough edges, please install this version and let me know on the forum.

You can download both Zoph 0.8.0.5 and 0.8.2 from the Sourceforge site.