Mardy (Articoli su PhotoTeleport)

PhotoTeleport 0.13

Alberto Mardegan — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 20:11:09 GMT

Just a quick note to let the world know that PhotoTeleport 0.13 has been released.

Implementing "Open with…" on MacOS with Qt

Alberto Mardegan — Sun, 13 Oct 2019 18:51:57 GMT

I just released PhotoTeleport 0.12, which includes the feature mentioned in the title of this blog post. Given that it took me some time to understand how this could work with Qt, I think it might be worth spending a couple of lines about how to implement it.

In the target application

The first step (and the easiest one) is about adding the proper information to your .plist file: this is needed to tell MacOS what file types are supported by your application. The official documentation is here, but given that an example is better than a thousand words, here's what I had to add to PhotoTeleport.plist in order to have it registered as a handler for TIFF files:

  <key>CFBundleDocumentTypes</key>
  <array>
    <dict>
      <key>CFBundleTypeExtensions</key>
      <array>
        <string>tiff</string>
        <string>TIFF</string>
        <string>tif</string>
        <string>TIF</string>
      </array>
      <key>CFBundleTypeMIMETypes</key>
      <array>
        <string>image/tiff</string>
      </array>
      <key>CFBundleTypeName</key>
      <string>NSTIFFPboardType</string>
      <key>CFBundleTypeOSTypes</key>
      <array>
        <string>TIFF</string>
        <string>****</string>
      </array>
      <key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
      <string>Viewer</string>
      <key>LSHandlerRank</key>
      <string>Default</string>
      <key>LSItemContentTypes</key>
      <array>
        <string>public.tiff</string>
      </array>
      <key>NSDocumentClass</key>
      <string>PVDocument</string>
    </dict>
    …more dict entries for other supported file formats…
  </array>

This is enough to have your application appear in Finder's "Open with…" menu and be started when the user selects it from the context menu, but it's only half of the story: to my big surprise, the selected files are not passed to your application as command line parameters, but via some MacOS-specific event which needs to be handled.

By grepping into the Qt source code, I've found out that Qt already handles the event, which is then transformed into a QFileOpenEvent. The documentation here is quite helpful, so I won't waste your time to repeat it here; what has hard for me was to actually find that this functionality exists and is supported by Qt.

In the source application

The above is only half of the story: what if you are writing an application which wants to send some files to some other application? Because of the sandboxing, you cannot just start the desired application in a QProcess and pass the files as parameters: again, we need to use the Apple Launch Services so that the target application would receive the files through the mechanism described above.

Unfortunately, as far as I could find this is not something that Qt supports; sure, with QDesktopServices::openUrlExternally() you can start the default handler for the given url, but what if you need to open more than one file at once? And what if you want to open the files in a specific application, and not just in the default one? Well, you need to get your hands dirty and use some MacOS APIs:

#import <CoreFoundation/CoreFoundation.h>
#import <ApplicationServices/ApplicationServices.h>

void MacOS::runApp(const QString &app, const QList<QUrl> &files)
{
    CFURLRef appUrl = QUrl::fromLocalFile(app).toCFURL();

    CFMutableArrayRef cfaFiles =
        CFArrayCreateMutable(kCFAllocatorDefault,
                             files.count(),
                             &kCFTypeArrayCallBacks);
    for (const QUrl &url: files) {
        CFURLRef u = url.toCFURL();
        CFArrayAppendValue(cfaFiles, u);
        CFRelease(u);
    }

    LSLaunchURLSpec inspec;
    inspec.appURL = appUrl;
    inspec.itemURLs = cfaFiles;
    inspec.asyncRefCon = NULL;
    inspec.launchFlags = kLSLaunchDefaults + kLSLaunchAndDisplayErrors;
    inspec.passThruParams = NULL;

    OSStatus ret;
    ret = LSOpenFromURLSpec(&inspec, NULL);
    CFRelease(appUrl);
}

In Imaginario I've saved this into a macos.mm file, added it to the source files, and also added the native MacOS libraries to the build (qmake):

LIBS += -framework CoreServices

You can see the commit implementing all this, it really doesn't get more complex than this. The first parameter to the MacOS::runApp() function is the name of the application; I've verified that the form /Applications/YourAppName.app works, but it may be that more human-friendly variants work as well.

Santa brings PhotoTeleport 0.9 with two more upload plugins

Alberto Mardegan — Sun, 30 Dec 2018 17:07:00 GMT

A few days ago I've released PhotoTeleport 0.9, whose main improvements from the previous version are the added support for Imgur and SmugMug.

PhotoTeleport is an open source, multi platform photo uploader, written in Qt + QtQuick.Controls 1 which supports uploading your photos, along with title, description and tags, to many different sites at the same time. Those interested in the detailed list of changes can read the full announcement here.

Announcing PhotoTeleport, a tool to upload your photos everywhere

Alberto Mardegan — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 06:48:00 GMT

I already wrote about PhotoTeleport in my previous post, but since not everyone can comfortably read interlingua, here's the English announcement

I've spent the last few months of my free time to work on a new application, called PhotoTeleport, which is a photo uploader capable of working with multiple photo sharing services at once.

It's an application I myself felt the need for, because as a photographer I keep my portfolio in many websites: I have a couple of pages in Facebook, and VK (a.k.a. "the Russian facebook"), but I also have a profile in other websites such as Flickr and DeviantArt, which I created to further promote my activity, but which alas I failed to keep up-to-date. The harsh reality is that working with multiple profiles is hard: even if you had just two profiles to maintain, it takes a lot of time to upload the photos to both of them and, no matter how convenient their user interface is, entering captions, descriptions and tags here and there is another boring, repetitive and time consuming task.
Then how about automating it? Enter PhotoTeleport, and all photographers rejoice!

The program in itself is very simple: you drag and drop the photos into its window, select which services you want to upload them to, add captions, descriptions and tags (if you like), review and then upload. For those who prefer a feature list in bullet points, here it is:

Support many photo sharing services: DeviantArt, Facebook, Flickr, Google Photos, VK, etc. (see here for an updated list)
Album selection, or creation of a new album (if the service supports it)
Fast editor for captions, descriptions and tags
Possibility to specify different captions, descriptions and tags for each website
Read metadata embedded in the image files
On upload completion, provide a link to the newly uploaded files for additional editing or sharing

This is just a beta version, but more features are planned, including:

Ability to save and restore session
Watermark support
Image scaling
Support for more plugins (500px, Imgur, Smugsmug, Shutterstock, Photobucket, Pinterest and more)
Support for uploading to a custom (S)FTP server

You are indeed welcome to suggest new features, just by adding a comment to this blog post, or by creating an issue in the PhotoTeleport bug tracker.

PhotoTeleport is available for Linux, MacOS X and Windows; to get it, please visit PhotoTeleport website.

Only for the geeks and the folks from the IT crowd

Here's some info for those who desire to hack on PhotoTeleport, or just to know more about the technology behind id: PhotoTeleport is an open source project, it's written in C++ and QML using the cross-platform Qt framework. The authentication to the remote servers is handled by libauthentication, a library that I wrote just before starting the work on Phototeleport to provide an easy way for Qt and QML based applications to authenticate and peform authorized requests to remove websites using the OAuth 1.0 and OAuth 2.0 protocols (other protocols can be supported too).

Linux users might ask me why I chose to ship PhotoTeleport as an AppImage package, rather than using Flatpak, Snap or a native distribution package like deb or rpm. This might deserve a blog post of its own, but in brief:

deb> or rpm: they require root permissions to be installed, moreover PhotoTeleport uses Qt 5.9 which is not available in all distributions, so if I have to bundle Qt with my package, I don't see many advantages over shipping an AppImage;
Snap: they require root permission to be installed, and the support for desktop applications is still incomplete;
FlatPak: there's no runtime for Qt applications (and no, I don't want to force users to install the whole KDE runtime!), and drag & drop is not supported yet.

That said, it's just a matter of making the best out of my little spare time. I can reach every Linux user with the AppImage format, so that's the first option I took. I'm certainly open to the idea of using also other formats in the future (I might make debs after Ubuntu 18.04 is released with Qt 5.9) and I'll happily accept any contribution that can make PhotoTeleport available in Snap, Flatpak or other formats. But I don't have the time pioneering that right now :-)

Fin del expectation :-)

Alberto Mardegan — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 16:12:00 GMT

In un previe articulo de blog io annunciava le sito de PhotoTeleport, ma sin explicar que es iste "PhotoTeleport". Ora le sito es preste, e finalmente io pote solver le enigma: PhotoTeleport es un programma pro publicar photographias a plure sitos de photo sharing, contemporaneemente.

Le photographos, qui ha lor portfolios in multe sitos differente (Facebook, Flickr, DeviantArt, 500px e alteres) va trovar iste programma especialmente utile, perque illo va reducer grandemente le tempores que on debe "perder" pro repeter le mesme operation de cargar le mesme photos in cata sito. Ma in nostre epocha de vita virtual, ubi totes ama condivider lor proprie photos super plures retes social, PhotoTeleport pote resultar utile a cata uno qui ama condivider momentos de proprie vita con su amicos. De facto, io invita omnes a discargar le programma e probar lo. Illo es disponibile pro computatores con systema operative Linux, MacOS X o Windows.

Pro plus de informationes, visita le sito de PhotoTeleport; in particular, le pagina del demandas frequente e le blog deberea satisfacer a omne curiositate — alteremente, vos es benvenite a demandar me plus!

Expectation

Alberto Mardegan — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 18:06:00 GMT

Salute, amicos! Io ha essite (quasi) silente in le ultime septimanas, a causa de varie occupationes. Le plus grande es le preparation de un programma per computator, que io ha quasi completate e cuje version "beta" essera tosto disponibile.

In ultra a laborar super le programma, io anque debe occupar me de crear un sito pro illo. Io non es un habile aranea (webmaster in interlingua), ma con Jekyll iste operation non es troppo difficile: il ha multissime modellos graphic disponibile, e illos es usualmente jam quasi preste a esser usate.
Pro le momento, io creava solmente un "tenente loco" (placeholder), un pagina singule pro transmitter le senso de "expectation": vos pote vider lo in phototeleport.com.

Si tosto que io ha le version beta preste, io va modificar le sito con un nove modello graphic, e adder un poco plus de contento (principalmente, alicun liamines pro discargar le programma!). Ma intertanto, esque vos pote divinar qual typo de programma io prepara? Le programma es appellate "PhotoTeleport"; qual ideas isto vos suggere?