Marco Fioretti takes a look at jBrout, a simple photo manager for Linux and Windows XP/2000.
First, I'll mention some issues with jBrout so that we can focus on the
good parts later. To begin with, jBrout can only manage pictures in jpeg
format, but that shouldn't be a problem for people who only have
smartphones or basic cameras that don't produce other formats anyway.
Secondly, jBrout documentation and downloads are not always
up to date (more on this below), and they're still scattered among the official web site, the old web site, and the project home.
This makes finding the right package and information harder than it
has to be. Finally, the jBrout feature I like the most (also explained below)
isn't really well-documented or stable, at least in the 0.3.359 RPM
version that I was able to test.
Despite these issues, my opinion about jBrout remains that it's a nice,
very simple photo manager that you should at least give a try.
jBrout feature tour
jBrout has a clean interface (Figure A), and its albums appear as
simple
folders and sub-folders on your hard drive. The first time you launch
jBrout, it will ask you (among other things) if you want to auto-rotate
your pictures and rename them according to their timestamps. Unless
you've already done that, I think you should answer "yes," at least to
the
second question. As I said in my very first post on TechRepublic,
consistent naming -- based on picture creation time -- is essential in photo archiving.
Figure A
jBrout has a clean interface.
jBrout can launch several external programs to process the
photographs in its albums. The only way to customize this part of its
interface is to open the configuration file by clicking File | Edit
external tools and edit it manually. You can enable or disable each of
the Operations from whole albums or single
photographs from the File | Preferences
panel (Figure B). It's also possible to add tags, categories,
ratings, and comments to the pictures. The search function can filter by
all those parameters, plus orientation (Landscape or Portrait), and time
range.
Figure B
Photo Operations.
The jBrout virtual Basket is very handy whenever you need to perform
the same operation (e.g. applying a common tag) on pictures scattered
across several albums. Select those pictures, put them in the Basket,
then open it and start working.
Share your pictures
jBrout makes sharing pictures easy. I couldn't test it myself, but there
is a media share function to make pictures easily available on
UPNP/DLNA digital TVs and media centers.
In addition to that, if you select some pictures, right-click them, and choose Export to,
you'll get the panel that you see in Figure C. From there, it's possible to email
your pictures or upload them to Picasa or Flickr, removing all their
metadata first. For reasons why you may really want to do that, please
(re)read the last of my photo archiving tips.
Figure C
Export options.
The HTML Gallery option of the same panel creates static
galleries (Figure D) that you can upload on your own web site, instead of Flickr or Picasa, or copy on a DVD.
Figure D
Static galleries.
The jBrout web server
The Operations menu of jBrout has another entry called Web Share.
If you click on it, you'll start a mini web server in a pop-up window
(Figure E). This will make all of the pictures that you've previously
selected accessible with any web browser from (at least) all the other
computers on the same local network (if they use the right address).
Figure E
Web Share.
The corresponding jBrout documentation
says that, once the server has been started, users of those other
computers should type http://ip.of.jbrout.computer://8080 in their
browsers to see the galleries. However, this is not correct. After some
trial and error, I found out that the
right address should have this format, instead:
http://192.168.1.6:8080/index?a=0&p=0 (the IP, in this example, is
192.168.1.6)
Local Web serving is the jBrout feature I like the most. With a few clicks, a jBrout user
can let everybody on the same local network browse selected pictures
from his or her computer without installing any software. The first scenario
where this may be useful is a class, but even friends or family meetings
may benefit from it.
In my experience, this feature only works well with pictures from one
album. When I selected several albums, I got pictures in some
cases and error messages in others. Even as is, however, jBrout can be a
decent photo manager. Have you tried jBrout? Share your experience in
the discussion thread below.
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