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dConstruct 2010 - Brighton

The sixth annual dConstruct conference is taking place in Brighton, England this week and I will be attending a workshop on Thursday and the main conference event on Friday. If anyone is in Brighton on either day, drop me a line if you're interested in meeting up during the conference.

Pixaria Gallery 2.9.3 Released

I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of Pixaria Gallery version 2.9.3 which though a minor update, does include one important new feature which is the ability to change the order of galleries.

This new addition works through the gallery browser tool in the admin area where there is a 'tree style' view of the galleries in your library. As of this release, the tree view is interactive making it possible to drag and drop galleries to rearrange the order or even change a parent gallery. The drag and drop capabilities are enabled by default after upgrading though there are currently a few small limitations:

1. It's not possible to drag and drop a gallery into another gallery unless it already has a child.
2. The gallery drag and drop function doesn't work in Internet Explorer 6.

To get this update, please drop me an e-mail at upgrade@pixaria.com and I'll send the new version to you. As always, please take a moment to check out the release notes and change log before upgrading as these contain full details of all the modifications in this version.

Note: Technical support for this upgrade is only available to users who are within their active support period (one year from date of original purchase or purchase of a support and upgrade extension).

Pixaria Gallery 2.9.2 Released

I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of Pixaria Gallery version 2.9.2. This update is primarily a bug fix release with just one new feature, a new option which makes it possible to allow users to access image downloads on completed carts before payment has been made.

To get this update, please drop me an e-mail at upgrade@pixaria.com and I'll send the new version to you. As always, please take a moment to check out the release notes and change log before upgrading as these contain full details of all the modifications in this version.

Note: Technical support for this upgrade is only available to users who are within their active support period (one year from date of original purchase or purchase of a support and upgrade extension).

More Image Colour Tagging

Following on from yesterday's article about the new image colour tagging features coming in Pixaria 3, I can now report that the new tagging function will be fully integrated with the bulk image editor which will, for the first time, make it possible to tag multiple images at once.

The screenshot below shows a section of the bulk image editor tool in Pixaria Gallery's admin area. From version 3, every image will be shown with a five colour palette of the most predominant hues and selection buttons on the palette itself will make it quick and easy to select the best match for use in the colour searching tools.

Alongside the new tagging capabilities, the search engine in Pixaria 3 will feature a much improved colour search algorithm that will provide both more accurate results and improved database performance for a truly best in class implementation of colour searching.

With colour searching becoming an increasingly requested feature for picture research, Pixaria 3.0 will provide all the tools you need to offer this on your own site with minimum hassle.

Image Colour Tagging

Pixaria Gallery contains many useful features and it's often the case that some of them may not be widely known or used. One example is the built in support for searching for images by colour which works by storing a mathematical representation of the predominant colour of an image in the database and matching this against user's selections from the search engine.

When colour searching is enabled in the admin area and images have been tagged with colour information, the search engine makes it simple to find images matching or close to a selected hue which is a great tool for picture researchers.

Although this is a very impressive feature, the major drawback is that images need to be manually tagged with colour information by visiting the image editor screen and picking a nearest match colour from a palette of colours. While this does the job, it's somewhat cumbersome to use and so I've been working on improvements to this feature for inclusion in version 3.0.

Starting with version 3.0, the colour selection palette in the image editor will include five colours that are representative of the predominant hues in the image and which will be displayed below the standard colour palette. As in the screenshot above, this makes it much easier to find relevant colours and tag them in the database.

The colour detection system I've built will be weighted towards brighter colours with high saturation and brightness which should help to pick out features like skin tones, and solid blocks of colours.

At the present time, automatic detection of the most relevant colour for an image is not straightforward using software as there's no way to determine which part of an image is the subject but I'm investigating other possibilities in this area which may yet make their way into version 3.