Pictures database and library mode; scan EXIF and IPTC metadata tags into a SQL db

Even if i like very much face recognition in picasa, this plugin is not intended to do that.
This plugin is more to add missing picture fonctionnality inside xbmc as a database management.
It would be amazing to get this feature but i m pretty sure python inside xbmc is too slow to make such picture manipulation.
Furthermore this plugin is made to show your LOCAL picture collection.
As said before my post, picasa (i hate facebook) do that very well and from it you can tag your pics with the name of people. Then you will find picture containing one specific person from 'sort by keyword'/name of the person.

No really, what you may expect later, is the ability to upload local pictures from this plugin to picasaweb (maybe flicker and even 'faceb**k' )

This is great.

But I think it should be part of the next release (after dharma) and not an add-on.
The "old" picture option is outdated

Yes and this is what this addon is started from... A discussion in which many users asks for a real picture functionnality inside XBMC. Here is the link :
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=22407

Now I made the addon, I would like it to be useful a verrrry long time, so i'm would not like XBMC include a true picture management !!

Furthermore I added some (I think) greeat functionnality since last version :
- Periods : enable to set a period of time to watch all pictures inside this period. User can save as many period as he likes and rename it at will
- Collections : enable user to create collections, then, add all pictures he wants inside collections he wants. You can see it as a 'picture albums' feature, but I didn't want to use this name. So it is named Collections

I wanted to release yesterday, but I encountered (once again) a lot of encodings errors... Right now I didn't succeed to repair these f****g encodings problems and I hope for you a new version by the end of the week...

Hi all

I'm still working on it and work pays !
HEre you can watch a video of what looks like the new pictures collections feature of my plugin. I Hope you enjoy it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0xQ9o7NPA8
I may add a new video soon, to show you the 'period' feature...

the other big feature : the period classement
You can watch all your pictures in a certain period of date wherever your pictures are physically saved to !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRRlgmeMO10

New version 0.2 is now sent to the team for update !

solexalex, many thanks for your efforts here. I tried to tag some photographs using 'microsoft pro photo tools' to see if I could select my photographs by keywords. I can't seem to get your addin to detect any keywords or location, so no photographs appear under the keyword option.

Is there a bug or am doing something wrong? I scan the folders every time I use the addin.

If this eventually works I think it will be a great addition to XBMC.

regards

drongo

Hi and thank you for your feedback.
For the 'sort by keyword' display, only exif keywords field are used. If you use your software to fill this field, then it should be ok.
None of the other fields are used (and it may be a way of developpement for later)

Another thing is that i know a bug which list keywords but sort not any picture for this keyword. The bug appear when keyword contain special non utf8 characters as i handle encodings very badly. It is one of my todo's for some next release

You may send me a couple of your pics to see whats wrong and maybe your database (mypictures.db) and xbmc.log if it stills bugging.
Are you using v0.2 mypicturesdatabase addon ?

solexalex, I'm using V0.2 on windows XP. I'm no expert on this but I think windows Xp is adding the keywords in UCS2 format, whilst I suspect your mysql database is expecting the keywords to be in UTF8 format.

'microsoft pro photo tools' recognises the keywords as the text that I type in. I downloaded 'Exif Pilot' and it recognises the windows keywords as a series of numbers in UCS2 format -

43 0 68 0 61 0 72 0 6C 0 69 0 65 0 0 0 - Charlie

Is it possible for your addon to read UCS2 keywords or to convert to UTF8 before querying the database. Alternatively, do you know of a way of adding keywords in UTF8 format whilst using windows XP.

Where is the mypictures database stored?

regards
Drongo

The better thing is to send me one of your pics. It is very helpful for me to test many different pictures from many different users.

I use win7 but keywords are properly recognized. You may have a look and try picasa. Or even XBMC can read exif, does xbmc read your keywords ?

The mypicture database is stored with all xbmc's databases
XBMC\userdata\Database