Mapivi 1.0 Preview

last update: 21.09.2009

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About

Open-source and cross-platform (UNIX, Mac OS X and Windows) picture manager / organizer written in Perl/Tk.

Mapivi is a photo management tool with focus on JPEG pictures. Mapivi supports adding, editing and searching of IPTC/IIM, EXIF data and JPEG comments. The pictures are managed in place (in your folder structure), so you are able to use other tools like file managers or other viewers together with Mapivi.

Mapivi is a stand alone tool, in the sense that there is no need for a web server, online access or a database.

The main window

Four different ways to browse your picture collection: by location, by keyword hierarchy, by timeline, by tag cloud

Meta information

EXIF information (like timestamp, camera model, focal length, exposure time, aperture, etc.) are stored in the pictures by digital cameras. Mapivi displays this information in a short and readable format, e.g, "2008-02-21 10:55:30 29mm (43mm) F5.6 1/125s +0.3 ISO200 Nikon D70". It is possible to rename pictures according to the EXIF creation date and to search and browse your photo collection by this date.

IPTC information (like keywords, caption, location, etc.) can be added to pictures using Mapivi. There are several ways to do this: The user is able to define his own hierarchical keyword catalog and to assign one or several keywords to a selection of pictures at once. Other IPTC tags like the caption can be assigned directly in the main window. Existing IPTC location information (Country, Province/State, City, Sublocation) can be assigned to a set of pictures. These and all other IPTC tags can be edited in the IPTC dialog (for one or several pictures at once).

Mapivi also support JPEG comments, but I recommend to use the structured IPTC information.

Mapivi saves all meta information where it belongs to - in the pictures.

When you add a caption to a picture (like "day in the garden with Tom, Tim and Peter") or add hierarchical IPTC keywords (like Nature.Plant.Flower.Rose) this meta information is stored in two places:

In the picture, where they will stay even if you send the picture via email to a friend or show it on your homepage and
in a small database of Mapivi. Searching for e.g. "Tom" AND "Tim" in this database will find the picture pretty fast.

Other meta information is also stored in the database, like the short EXIF info (so you can search for the date the picture was taken or even the aperture you used) and the complete IPTC info. But the master information source is always the picture.

One big advantage of this decentral information storage is the independence of the tool, because the meta information can also be changed by other tools than Mapivi.

Here are some thoughts about image archiving.

Image processing

Mapivi supports several lossless JPEG operations, like rotation, cropping and framing of pictures. Other basic image processing (color correction or unsharp mask operation) are also supported [more]. Mapivi serves here as a frontend (GUI) for many proven command line tools, like the Image Magick tools.

Mapivi may also be used to build picture galleries for the web and other stuff.

Mapivi is free software (see License), if you like it you may make a donation from my donation page or via sourceforge:

Donations received since start of project in 2002 (last update: 17.11.2006): 116$ via PayPal and some CDs from my amazon wishlist. March 2008: Mapivi had more than 31,000 downloads so far.

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News

Track/Subscribe/Monitor Mapivi

If you want to receive an email when a new Mapivi version is available, you may use Freshmeat press "Subscribe to new releases" on the Freshmeat Mapivi page.

Mapivi 1.0 Preview

I'm happy to announce a new Mapivi version!

All ways to browse and search your pictures are now united in the navigation frame (see screenshots below). This enables easy navigation through your pictures by your folder structure, keywords, keyword cloud, search, location or date information.

The default colors changed to a neutral gray to allow a better focus on your pictures.

This preview version is available for all platforms, but only as Perl distribution. It's quite stable, but not yet recommended for productive usage. Anyhow I would be happy to receive some feedback.

The actual development release is available at Sourceforge Develop in the Mapivi Subversion. You can either check out the repository or download a tarball there.

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Copyright and License

Mapivi - Martin's Picture Viewer

Mapivi is free software, if you like it you may make a donation via my donation page or via sourceforge:

Mapivi - a picture viewer and manager for Linux/UNIX, Mac OS X and Windows written in Perl/Tk
Supporting JPEG meta informations like: EXIF, IPTC/IIM and JPEG comments
© 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 Martin Herrmann <Martin-Herrmann@gmx.de> All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307, USA.

Install

Requirements

For all Mapivi distributions

a computer running UNIX (Linux, Solaris, ...), Mac OS X or Windows (2000, XP, ...)
jpegtran to do the loss-less rotation. jpegtran is included e.g. in the The Independent JPEG Group's JPEG software release 6b (this is part of most linux distributions as part of the libjpg package, a Linux and a Windows binary are also available (both include the lossless crop and drop feature).
the command line tools convert, mogrify, identify and composite (or combine) from Image Magick (this is also part of most linux distributions)
jhead for the automatic lossless rotation

For the Perl distribution

Perl 5.005 or better
Perl/Tk 800.015 or better
Perl module Image::MetaData::JPEG in version 0.14 or newer
Perl module Image::Info
Only for old Perl/Tk versions: Perl module Tk::JPEG (this is included in Perl/Tk at least since version 804.025. So, please don't try to install it if you have a more recent Perl/Tk version.)

optional stuff (for all Mapivi distributions)

the patch for jpegtran to do lossless cropping
xwd, to make screenshots (should be available on nearly all UNIX systems)
gimp-win-remote, to open a picture with GIMP (windows only)
jpegpixi, to do nearly lossless interpolation (remove dead pixels). Only needed if your camera has some CCD defects.

optional stuff (only needed for the Perl distribution)

Perl module Tk::MatchEntry. This is highly recommended, if you work with IPTC information.
Perl module Tk::ResizeButton to adjust the column width of the thumbnail table. Nice feature.
Perl module Tk::Splash for a nice splash screen, when loading Mapivi. Not important.

You will find all needed perl modules at CPAN (http://search.cpan.org/)

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Download

Download Mapivi

Mapivi may be downloaded at Sourceforge/Mapivi. Thanks to for hosting!

You will find three different packages there

Mapivi_Linux - Linux executable distribution (no Perl needed)
Mapivi_Perl - Perl distribution (OS independent), requires an Perl installation
Mapivi_Win32 - Windows executable distribution (no Perl needed)

While Mapivi_Linux and Mapivi_Win32 are easier to install, I recommend the Perl version. At the moment it's the only one containing all help files and icons. The performance of all three should be nearly the same, but the startup of the Perl version is the fastest.

You will find more information in the INSTALL file.

Download statistics

It's possible to set a tracker on the Mapivi project at Freshmeat or Sourceforge to receive an email when a new version is available.

You will find infos about the different versions in the change log.

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User feedback

Mapivi's IPTC support is first-rate.
Given the feature set and capabilities of this software, it's hard to conceive of using anything else for a Linux DAM solution at present.
Your photo manager has by far the best handling of IPTC of any Linux photo manager, and a good user interface and search interface, without requiring the user to run a full relational database server.
Mapivi supplements the Linux tools and enables to get into professional photo trade.
I'm a big fan of MAPIVI. It's the most feature-rich thumbnailer I've used on any platform, plus it has the best IPTC support I've seen. It's not as "pretty" as Picassa, but it is rock-solid.
I am very satisfy with Mapivi and its IPTC features.
An awesome application!!! Very good work!
A big compliment for your software! I really have to admit, it is by far suited best to manage my pictures!
Thanks for creating and sharing Mapivi. It looks to be very powerful, sensible, and most importantly, as non-intrusive to *my* filing system as possible - thanks!
Thanks for the program. It is one of my favorites for pictures.
Compared to other applications that I've tried, this is really the best.
Please keep going: a much needed program!
An excellent photo viewer - finally usable jpg commenting in Linux!
I like the extension with other tools (jpegtran and ImageMagick) -- it's a far better idea than trying to roll out and integrate one's own implementations.

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