iPhotoToGallery

If you find a bug in iPhotoToGallery and want it to be fixed quickly, here’s what to do:

• Create a user on your Gallery installation for me, and verify that you can duplicate the bug with that user
• Email me the user information (gallery@zwily.com) with a detailed description of the behavior you’re seeing
• Wait for me to investigate

Here’s what not to do:

• Post about it on some random website (which I almost definitely don’t read)

It boggles my mind that people will complain about a problem in the plugin without even bothering to email me about it. I can’t fix what I don’t know about.

Some people with newer Gallery installations have had problems with their albums not showing up when they log in. This release should fix that. If 0.50 worked for you, there’s not really a reason to download this new one as that fix is the only thing included.

After much delay, the next version of the plugin is ready for you to try out. This was mostly a major rewrite, but I also managed to include the following features:

• Ability to set up exporting to several different Galleries, and information on those galleries is stored
• Passwords are stored in the Keychain
• Other defaults (like the state of checkboxes, etc) are stored
• UI redesign (friendly for 800×600 people!)
• Ability to export the “Comments” field to the “Description” custom field in an album (if your Gallery installation is new enough)
• Support for HTTP Basic Auth
• Support for SSL
• EXIF data is preserved when resizing, as much as possible
• Albums can be given a name (the short name used in the URL)
• Some stability fixes

I haven’t tried this on OS X 10.2 or iPhoto 2 yet. The disk I had an installation of 10.2 on has died, and rather than delaying this release until I could come up with another installation, I thought I’d let you try it out. It should work, I tried to avoid Panther-only features. Let me know.

There’s at least one annoying issue I know about - occasionally the export will look like it hangs on the last photo. If this happens and that last picture looks like it got in the gallery okay, just hit cancel. I’ve managed to reduce it to happening “not very often” on my computer, hopefully I’ll be able to eliminate it with a future release.

Important disclaimer - This is still beta software. It might crash iPhoto. It might erase all your pictures. It might call you nasty names. The last 2 aren’t very likely, but I take no responsibility if it happens. Some people have expressed concern about the possibility of their photo library being corrupted when iPhoto crashes. All I can say is, in all my development work on the plugin I’ve crashed iPhoto countless times, and my library has always been okay. Be sure to back yours up if you’re really worried about it. And if iPhoto does crash, feel free to send me a crash report from the Crash Reporter along with details about what you were doing at the time.

Anyway, download it here. Enjoy!

Update: One more thing I meant to mention. The only way to edit a Gallery’s configuration is to remove the gallery and re-add it. So if you get the password wrong or something, you have to delete it and re-add it. Yes, it’s dumb, but that’s the way it is for now. I’ll fix it in the future.

Update 2: If you’ve recently upgraded your gallery and there are some albums that need to be upgraded, an export into one of those albums will fail on the first try. I think on the first try Gallery upgrades the album, then the second try works.

I got my boxed copy of iLife ‘04 today. Installing iPhoto 4 with the installer, and then installing the iPhotoToGallery plugin with the current installer works just fine.

Many of you have emailed telling me that iPhotoToGallery doesn’t work on iPhoto 4. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it looks like it’s just a permissions problem when it’s installed. I’ve got the plugin running fine on my copy of iPhoto 4, with no modifications to the plugin itself. So, the plugin DOES work on iPhoto 4, just not when it’s installed with my installer.

For those that are trying iPhoto 4 and can’t wait for the new installer: If you’ve got your copy of iPhoto 2 sitting around anywhere with the plugin installed, you can copy the iPhoto.app/Contents/Plugins/iPhotoToGallery.iPhotoExporter bundle into the same location of your iPhoto 4 installation and it should work.

If you’re wondering about the next version of the plugin - it’s coming. Slower than I’d like because of responsibilities placed on me by my “real” job, but it will be done soon.