Zoph 0.9.17 released

01 May 2021 by jeroen

Zoph v0.9.16 came out at the end of last year and I planned to release v0.9.17 on the first of April. However, I had quite a few things that were 'nearly' done at that time so I gave myself an extra month to finish those and still have some time to test it properly. This has resulted in a release with a lot of changes.

I've extended the XMP feature with the possibility to load the XMP-data from a 'sidecar' file. This means that the XMP data for, for example IMAGE_001.JPG is stored in IMAGE_001.JPG.XMP, giving you the possibility to store information about your photos without actually modifying the file itself.

The Zoph CLI `zoph` can now be used to create and display users. This can be handy to script Zoph installations or modifications. It was requested for the inclusion of Zoph in FreedomBox, a project aiming to create a home server appliance that can be used by non-technical users. Check out their demo if you want to know more. (Unfortunately, at this moment, Zoph is visible there, but not yet installable).

Zoph now allows the use of the '-' character as part of the path where photos are stored.

Zoph stored the date and time a photo was taken (from EXIF data) and when it was last edited. However, as soon as a photo was edited at for the first time, the date and time a photo was imported was lost. As of this version, this data is stored, this will enable something like "recently imported" overviews in the future. During the change, the last edited date/time is stored as the 'imported' time, for all new photos imported as of the version, the 'real' import date will be stored.

Zoph has had a possibility to create an 'annotated' version of a photo for a long time. This would enable you to create a photo where some data of the photo would be added to a text block at the bottom of the photo, mostly when mailing a photo. The result looks rather dated and doesn't really have a good use case. I highly doubt anyone uses it, so I've decided to deprecate the function and remove it in the next version. If you have this feature enabled, Zoph will warn you. If you actually use this feature, please let me know in Issue #150

Furtermore, a few bugs have been fixed and, invisible to most, a lot of work has been done in the 'background'. The ongoing project of moving all Zoph's frontend (HTML) code to separate templates has made a number of changes. I've also done work on unittests, tests used to automatically run hundreds of tests on Zoph's source code after every change.

Finally, Leaflet, the library used add maps to the user interface, has been updated to the latest version. Unfortunately, due to changed licence terms from Google, I have had to remove Google Maps support.

The full changelog can be found in the changelog. You can download Zoph from the Gitlab site.