rapid-users team mailing list archive

[Damon Lynch <damonlynch@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

This is just a brief note to say that I've been prototyping the next 
version. There will be two primary changes: the user interface, and an 
increase in program performance.

I've decided to present the images prior to download as thumbnails, 
rather than as a list:

thumbnails

Please note this is just a prototype and of course there are plenty of 
things that are wrong and/or missing, like the buttons to actually begin 
the download, etc. etc.

When you double click on one of the images, it will show you a full 
screen preview, scaled up to the size of the window:

preview

You can double-click to go back to the list of thumbnails. Eventually 
I'll need to add buttons to provide the same functionality, too, as well 
as keyboard navigation, etc.

The increase in performance should be immediately apparent: it's about 
50 times faster to scan all the photos and videos, and generate 
thumbnails for them. What does that mean, in a practical sense? In the 
test above, with almost 3,500 images totalling approximately 61GB, 
version 0.3.4 with pyexiv 0.3.0 took over half an hour to scan all the 
photos and videos(!). The prototype takes 36 seconds, which isn't bad 
for considering it's reading from compact flash cards. For those users 
who don't care about thumbnails and just want to immediately download 
everything, the actual scan (without thumbnail generation) took place in 
1.5 seconds, which is about 1000 times faster.

The performance increase comes about because (1) I'm using python 
multiprocessing instead of python threads, and (2) I've been careful to 
optimize where it makes sense to do so, e.g. only grab a high resolution 
thumbnail when it's actually displayed.

Let me know what you think.

Damon

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http://www.damonlynch.net