Stuffware Cheese

Cheese is a lightweight, cross platform (wxWidgets) replacement for Photo Studio (which despite many years of faithful service is now really showing its's age). Cheese's main purpose is to speed up the process of getting images from your digital camera onto the web. Here's the core design principles of Cheese:

• Spend less time fighting with Finder. I often don't get round to clearing out my digital camera until it has quite a few days' worth of pictures on it, but I like to have my pictures neatly sorted into a folder per day. Doing this manually turned out to be surprisingly awkward. So, if you want to have your images filed by year / month / day, then Cheese can do this for you, based on the times in the EXIF metadata in your JPEG images.
• Lossless rotation the safe and holistic way. Cheese can rotate JPEG images without any loss in quality (thanks to good old libjpeg). OK so a lot of apps can do this. However, the tricky part is sorting out the inline EXIF thumbnails. If you don't rotate these then it can be irritatingly inconsistent. If you do rotate these you risk damaging the rest of the EXIF metadata. Cheese however has a clever approach to rotating thumbnails without risking damage to any of the EXIF metadata (see here for more details about the wizardry involved in this).
• Edit comments efficiently. If you're planning to put your images on the web, then adding comments makes the resulting pages a lot more interesting viewing. However, writing these comments can be a really laborious task. The UI in Cheese (whilst pretty basic) is streamlined for fast comment editing - after you've written a comment for one image, a single key press will save and move on to the next image. So you never have to take your hands away from the keyboard, and you can rattle off those comments in much less time.
• Folders have feelings too. The images themselves are not the only things that can benefit from having metadata, such as comments. So cheese lets you attach titles, descriptions etc to folders as well. You can use this metadata in your webpages. This is particularly useful when you want to split a set of related images into groups in different folders. The metadata for each folder can be used to build a webpage indexing all the other folders. I do this a lot on John's Pictures - see here for an example.
• Create web pages with a single click (or key press). Just one stroke will generate a web page for a folder of images for you - and not just a web page, but also "web resolution" versions of your images, and thumbnails. In fact it even works recursively - if you generate a web page in a folder with subfolders, then Cheese will go through and generate the web pages for all the sub folders too. And the sub folders of the sub folders. And so on.
• No web technology wheel reinvention. Unlike Photo Studio, there are no "activity box" dialogs to define templates and layouts for your webpages. Cheese does not actually generate any HTML itself - it just generates pure XML, and then uses an XSLT file to convert it into HTML.

Download v1.01 beta - released 13th May 2007 (Mac OS X only)

As before - BE REALLY, REALLY CAREFUL - only use this on images which you have safely backed up elsewhere. Basically this is just a move from wxWidgets version 2.6.3 to 2.8.3, however this makes for a significant improvement in image quality - both the rendering of images within the UI and the quality of thumbnail/web images generated by the program.

Download v1.0 beta - released 9th May 2007 (Mac OS X only)

This is a very early beta release - BE REALLY, REALLY CAREFUL - only use this on images which you have safely backed up elsewhere. There's a high probability this will crash or just not work at all. However, I'm putting out this first release early anyway. It is being distributed under a "Grumpyware" license - I don't want to hear any complaints about what it could do better!

Default XSLT file

You'll need this if you want to generate any HTML index files. This needs to be downloaded to:

/Users/yourusername/Web/cheese.xsl