Crafty Scrapbook

New for February! Download Version 0.22!

Your pictures and your movies are your personal history. An ordinary photograph that you take today will be much more interesting in five years. In twenty years it will be a window into a time that no longer exists. In one hundred years it will be a historical document. If you have children then your pictures will become part of their heritage, and their children's heritage. So how the heck do you keep track of them all? With all the digital cameras, scanners, and digital movie cameras out there, it's easy to drown in a sea of files. What is Crafty Scrapbook? Crafty scrapbook is a digital heritage project. I started it as an effort to create a simple tool to manage digital photos and video clips. It is still a work in progress, but Crafty's main strength is its ability to sensibly organize and manage tens of thousands of content items while keeping it easy to find the single item you may be looking for at any time. Crafty supports the following features. Keep information on each picture, such as who is in it, the type of event, etc. Be able to share individual pictures and lists of pictures with friends. Have all content accessable via a web interface. user and group based privacy model that can allow unlimited access to some pictures while more closely restricting access to others. Make backing everything up easy. Why use crafty scrapbook? After all, there are many good tools already out there, like Ofoto, or Apple computer's iPhoto, that manage your photos Scalability -- easy to manage vast numbers of images. Powerful browsing and searching features. Because it's SQL driven, you can say things like "show me all pictures of Roger taken last year," etc. End users do not have to know SQL, it's done via simple forms and links. Web interface for everything, so publishing to the web isn't a separate step. If your picture is in the scrapbook, it's available via the web server. Able to track multiple versions of the same picture. If you edit a large picture (crop, touch up, whatever) your edits and the original stay together for easy tracking What does Crafty not do? Crafty is excellent at organizing your digital content and presenting it in a controlled manner on the web. But it is not a content editor. For example, if you need to crop, rotate, adjust contrast, etc., that currently needs to be done outside of Crafty. It's possible that future work may address this, perhaps in the form of a Java applet. But I'm not sure a web-based photo editor will be a better alternative to external tools that exist today. Technical Base Crafty scrapbook is based on the following technologies: java servlets sql and JDBC javascript Tea The project page on sourceforge is here The documentation: Licence Information Setup Using Changelist/version hitory Planned future features

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