JPEG Saver 5.7
Published
JPEG Saver 5.7 is another one of those releases that doesn't look like it changes much. Sorry. But I have changed quite a bit.
Finding images…
Most of the changes in this version are related to how JPEG Saver finds the images to display. The most substantial change is a whole new way of finding the images, with the process split into two threads: one to find the list of files and another to add the images to the database. This change should make the process quite a bit faster - it certainly did in my tests.
The second change is to the “Finding images” message, this time updating the status text with what JPEG Saver is actually doing. There are several very short steps in the process that happen before the serious work begins that you probably won't see, but you are fairly likely to see a status of “Checking for updated folders” if you have a reasonable number of images and folders to scan. After that step the status is replaced with “Found” and the number of images that have been discovered in this run.
The next change is a very simple one that should improve performance again, but it meant I had to change the config dialog a bit. JPEG Saver now has an option for keeping the current database for a while without doing a rescan. This means it can start up, check the database exists, check the list of folders is unchanged and then start displaying images without rescanning the folder contents. The option to control this is in the new “More controls” dialog which you access from a new button where the shape skip option used to be (that's moved into the new dialog too). The new option is called “Reuse DB” and defaults to keeping the database for five minutes. That's a very low value, and you can configure it up to two days if you like - or turn it off if you prefer the old behaviour.
Another new option in the “More controls” dialog is “Rescan folders”. This lets you configure how often JPEG Saver will rescan folders that haven't obviously been updated. This periodic rescanning was added in version 5.5, but was fixed at an interval of two weeks. If you know the contents of your folders never change you can increase this, or if your folders are on a drive that doesn't keep sensible time stamps you can decrease it.
Other updates
The interactive favourites have been renamed from 1-5 to A-E. This is because someone pointed out that using the numbers 6-0 as the keys for favourites 1-5 was a bit confusing and I had to agree.
The file size is now available from the Image Info item, which is weird because I could swear it was already available. How did I miss that out? The file size is displayed using a value in KB or MB, and the memory use tokens from the Process Info item also displays in MB instead of raw bytes now too.
I've made a few more changes that this, but the other updates are for improving performance in various different parts of the system and are not individually very interesting.
Coming soon?
Next on the to-do list is something I've been thinking about for years, then quietly shoving it to the bottom of the list for another time. More and more people have been asking me about it, so I'm going to see if I can get some support for displaying video files in the next version. I was hoping to get something working for version 5.7, but I'm still at the *figuring out what and how* stage and I wanted to get this version out before any more major global catastrophes occur.
Apart from the video thing there are a lot of other useful changes for me to look at, and I hope to get at least some of them in the next version. And more transitions too, just because I enjoy writing them.
Version 5.7 of JPEG Saver is available from the downloads page.