Has It Really Been Five Years?
2009-10-17
I was working on PhotoPrint today and noticed the copyright messages in certain source files go all the way back to 2004. This got me thinking - when was the first public release of PhotoPrint?
It turns out, it was 5 years ago, almost to the day!
On October 23rd, 2004, I sent this message to the gimp-print-devel mailing list:
Hi Everyone,
If anyone's interested, I've just uploaded a preview release of a little utility for printing images directly through GIMP-Print/GutenPrint.
Highlights include:
* Can print multiple images on a page, with selectable number of rows and columns.
* Sends 16-bit data to GIMP-Print/GutenPrint
* Can handle 16-bit RGB TIFFs, and high-depth PNMs (not tested extensively...), BMPs and JPEGs.
* Can apply ICC colour profiles
* Can generate rough-cast ICC Profiles on the fly, given primary x,y coordinates, Gammas and Colour Temperature.
(Since we don't yet have even generic ICC profiles for GIMP-Print, the example configuration file generates an output profile with the same primaries and gamma as sRGB, but with the white-point set to 5500K)
* Can read and use an embedded profile in a TIFF file.
There's no user interface - it's a shell utility that makes quite a useful addition to GQView's external editors menu...
Configuration is done through a file in your home directory. Currently only the bare minimum of GIMP-Print options are implemented, just Quality, PaperSize, PaperType and a couple of others - colour-adjustment options will follow.
An example configuration file is provided, set up to print to a Stylus Color 600 with the CUPS name STC600.
Please bear in mind that it's still experimental, so you try it out at your own risk, but I'd be grateful for any feedback, bug reports or example files that it fails to handle correctly.
The url is:
http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/projects/photoprint-0.1-preview.tgz
You need devel files for lcms, libtiff, libjpeg, pam (netpbm) and of course GIMP-Print 5
Needless to say much has changed since then - PhotoPrint began life as a simple command-line utility, and has grown into a multi-platform, multi-threaded GUI application, but more importantly, I've had a lot of fun and learned a great deal in the process.
Best of all, though, is the feedback I've received from users - many of whom have made excellent suggestions for future features. I'm only sorry I haven't had more time in order to implement them all!
I'd like to say a big THANK YOU! to everyone who's provided feedback, suggested features, provided translations or made contributions of any kind, even if it's just having taken a couple of minutes to say "Hey, nice program :)"!
