This week is Hack Week at Novell. Work on the Linux and Free Software project of your choice.

I choose to work on bringing digital camera RAW and metadata.

Several defined goal reached today:

  • Thumbnailing digital camera RAW for Nautilus. The current solution I know and packaged a year and a half ago for Ubuntu was based on dcraw. Mine is based on libopenraw, and is faster. It just handle less format, but this will be solved in the future. In the mean time I discovered that the Debian package of UFRaw was setting UFRaw to produce the thumbnails (using the provided mime-info). So why reinventing the wheel? Because I believe that a solution based on libopenraw is much better integrated and probably much more efficient[1]. Other alternative hacks I have seen require the use of ExifTool (with Perl) or dcraw command-line tool. I have a raw-thumbnailer working, to be released.
  • XMP support in EOG - bug #451101. Patch is attached. This one make use of Exempi 1.99.2 (that I have not released soon). The support is a bit rough in the UI, and only works for JPEG as it is currently a limitation of EOG. I also think that the metadata should be reconciled in one set for clarity.

To be done:

  • XMP support in Nautilus. Same strategy as for EOG. Possibly add it for digital camera RAW files.
  • See if the metadata in EOG can be reconciled (see above).
  • See how to provide support for editing.

Notes

[1] I'm seriously biased :-)