Author Topic: v3.65 to v3.68 - new PhotoFusion stuff (Read 29317 times)

ScottMorris · « **on:** January 20, 2009, 10:02:50 PM »

v3.65 is out in the usual place.

There are many changes and fixes in this version (since the latest public release, v3.61). The most significant is the revamping of the PhotoFusion system.

The way the thumbnails behave has been improved (in our opinion, let us know if you disagree). PhotoFusion itself is now it's own dialog under "Analysis" (previously it was buried in the File Properties dialog, where people had trouble finding it.

Also, PhotoFusion now reads and write EXIF GPS header info. So we're fully geotagging photos! In order to write GPS EXIF info you need exiftool.exe in your default tracks directory. Luckily, TF will auto download the file from topofusion.com and place it in your default tracks directory. A dialog asking you to download it will come up if you hit the "Place Waypoints" button. Once it's there you can geotag to your hearts content.

I'm getting pretty excited about furthering the integration of photos, GPS and maps. So look for more PhotoFusion stuff in the future.

As always, problems or suggestions here or on the forums.

Thanks.

ScottMorris · « **Reply #1 on:** January 20, 2009, 10:03:15 PM »

Changes since v3.61:

3.65 - [1/20/09] (Beta)

PhotoFusion enhancements:
* PhotoFusion now found in Analysis Menu
* Added ability to read Lat/Lon coordinates from Jpeg EXIF headers
  (upon placement with PhotoFusion)
* Added ability to write Lat/Lon coordinates to Jpeg EXIF headers
  Requires the freeware "exiftool.exe" program, which TopoFusion will
  automatically download for you, if you choose.
* Added elevation data to waypoints (and EXIF headers)
* Added Help and Explore buttons
* Fixed minor display issues, esp with deleted photos
* Can now right click on thumbnails in map to open waypoint dialog, delete, etc
* (Also see v3.63 changes to photo thumbnail enlarging / selecting)

Other fixes:
Fixed .TCX/.CRS (Edge 705) track splitting problems
(tracks no longer split at Lap and "Auto pause")
Fixed over-clipping issue with 3-point calibration user maps
Fixed headers for Custom WMS requests (necessary for certain new servers)
(added HTTP/1.1 and Host: headers)
Enabled "Follow Download" when switching back to Serial from USB in GPSDialog
Fixed "off by one error" in Send to GPS function (when GPS dialog already open)

3.64 - [01/2/09] (Beta)

New '09 splash/about screens
Fixed endless loop when shrinking PhotoFusion thumbnails
Fixed problem reading Magellan .UPT waypoint files

3.63 - [12/27/08] (Beta)

Added "Order printed map" option to File menu
Links directly to TopoFusion / AdventureStation.com's map
printing engine, centered at the current map location
Changed mouse behavior for photo thumbnails on map
Mouse over only slightly enlarges pic
Click once to enlarge
Click again to open photo in windows (default .jpg software)
Changed distribution of tile cache (200/512/Pic tile sizes) in favor
of more 512/Pics.
Added warning message when tile cache is not large enough to display
all currently visible photo thumbnails
Fixed problems with full pathnames showing up in PhotoFusion generated HTML
Fixed errors in reported bearings while drawing tracks
Fixed handling of WMS request strings that include protocol (http://) in them
Fixed subtle differences in stats (e.g. track length) when loading file
initially vs. reloading the file. (floating point rounding)

3.62 - [12/03/08] (Beta)

Added support for Garmin's "TrackPointExtension/v1" for GPX
Heart Rate and Cadence now supported for read/write in GPX
(e.g. Garmin Oregon/Colorado with HR/Cad sensors)
Fixed issues reading PhotoFusion'd GPX files with apostrophes
Fixed issue with loss of HR/Cad/Power when using the merge tool
Fixed intermittent crashes when saving out a drawn track

Larry · « **Reply #2 on:** January 21, 2009, 11:10:59 AM »

Hey Scott,

This is great! The ability to write lat lon to EXIF headers will be great for FS documentation. And the added right click dialogs are very handy too. The more of these the better I think, as long as the choices are pertinent to the object(s) under the cursor.

Here's one minor thing you might think about: My latest Vista 64 bit machine is very fast; it will zoom in and out with amazing speed. But also, the wheel (which zooms by default) is very sensitive. It's easy to overdo it and go too far. Not a big deal until I turn 'show pictures' on and there are a large number of pictures to show. Sometimes it's a fair wait while they all try to auto-arrange themselves, during which time TF will not respond to further input. And the computer may remember that there were a few more wheel movements in the cue, so once the pics are arranged, the next wheel setting is processed, and so on, all the while with the user not being able to intervene. Maybe some mouse sensitivity settings right within TF, that would only apply to TF.

Larry

ScottMorris · « **Reply #3 on:** January 21, 2009, 12:45:00 PM »

Hey Larry,

Good point. I'll take a look and see if I can do something about preventing a queue of mouse wheel events from stacking up.

Photo loading should be more or less "background", but I'm sure it does slow things down somewhat.

In other news, I just added Washington to the color tileset. Pretty sure this server is as good as the others. ':cool:'

Larry · « **Reply #4 on:** January 22, 2009, 07:37:22 AM »

Quote (ScottMorris @ Jan. 21 2009,10:45)

Photo loading should be more or less "background", but I'm sure it does slow things down somewhat.

In other news, I just added Washington to the color tileset. Â Pretty sure this server is as good as the others. Â ':cool:'

Just thinking Scott, maybe part of the problem is that the photo loading is 'more or less' in the background, instead of always.

Oh, yes, as usual I forgot some of the settings already present in TF.

'> Like mouse wheel zooming speed, and zooming smoothness. I had the smoothness maxed out for making html maps the exact area I wanted.

Here's some more info from one of my files that loads maybe 20 or more pics taken with a 12 mp camera. As I zoom in, I can see from my cpu usage meter in the sidebar that both cores start working quite hard. Zoom a bit more and one core maxes out (so says the meter!) and the other is at maybe 75 percent. At this point, I can no longer interact with TF, and the title bar says TF "not responding", plus the menu bar goes black. Once the cpu work has finished, I can then move the map around, but the menu bar stays black until I hit 'alt'. Then only the functional part of it returns. From a practical standpoint, the best option is to leave 'show photos' off until I am at a zoom level where I want to explore. But turning the photos on and off is a pain when I would have to do it repeatedly.

Hope this helps.

And could you point me to somewhere that will tell me how to activate the Washington color tileset; the info and code that I'm supposed to paste into the dialog box(s)? Man, this is going to to be *so* cool.

'>

Larry

ScottMorris · « **Reply #5 on:** January 22, 2009, 01:30:47 PM »

Larry,

Check out v3.66, just out now. Washington is a part of the color tileset now.

The photos are opened and resized by different threads, so in theory they are in the background. However, I still want to look at blocking the queuing of mouse wheel scrolls. How large are your photos (roughly, in megabytes?). On my computer there isn't a noticeable slowdown when loading ~12 photos, but they are only a megabyte or so each.

Thanks.

ScottMorris · « **Reply #6 on:** January 22, 2009, 01:32:07 PM »

Here's the full change list for v3.66:

3.66 â€“ [1/22/09]

Added 3 states to Color tileset:
  Washington State, Georgia and West Virginia
Added TopoWMS server to CustomWMS server default list
Downloads / displays Topo maps that span UTM zones and are in
  Lat / Lon projection
Added limited 3D playback and multi-track playback
  Map updates as playback proceeds. Follow options not supported.
Minor tweaks to exiftool downloading dialog
Fixed failed jpeg time/date reading with certain camera types
Fixed writing of 0,0 EXIF coordinates when PhotoFusion cannot compute
  position of a photo

Larry · « **Reply #7 on:** January 23, 2009, 05:02:17 PM »

Quote (ScottMorris @ Jan. 22 2009,11:30)

Â How large are your photos (roughly, in megabytes?). Â

Scott, the pics linked to the test file I was using are about 3.5 to 5 megs. There are about 20 or more of them taken along a one mile section of a ski route, so there is a zoom level when it's very hard for the computer to find a non-overlapped space for all of them. But it tries.

'> Eventually it gets there, but I can't interact with the program in the mean time.

The color tiles are amazing by the way. Maybe you don't want to mention this yet, but is there a way to use the load maps tool to download only the color tiles for an area?

Larry

ScottMorris · « **Reply #8 on:** January 24, 2009, 04:37:37 PM »

Hmm. I've tried loading 117 5+ mb images and I can still zoom around quite smoothly while they load (which takes a while). Wonder why it's locking up for you. Are you by chance downloading maps at the same time?

I still haven't enabled batch downloading for the new color tileset. Perhaps in the next beta, though I do want to get this one released, too.

ScottMorris · « **Reply #9 on:** January 24, 2009, 04:39:08 PM »

Oh, were you placing the photos or just loading the file after they had already been placed.

In the former case, try the new beta - v3.67. It should behave much better esp. when adding EXIF info to large batches of pics.

3.67 - [1/24/09] (Beta)

Improved PhotoFusion functionality:

* Faster EXIF header writing
* Capable of large batches of photos
* Added progress indicator
* Added option to NOT place waypoints (only write EXIF headers)

Larry · « **Reply #10 on:** January 26, 2009, 06:43:09 AM »

Quote from: ScottMorris on January 24, 2009, 04:39:08 PM

Oh, were you placing the photos or just loading the file after they had already been placed.

In the former case, try the new beta - v3.67. It should behave much better esp. when adding EXIF info to large batches of pics.

Scott, I was just loading the photos, not placing them. However, whatever you changed with v3.67 fixed the problem.

Works great now. 'Hokey Smokes', as Rocky the Squirrel used to say.

Larry

Larry · « **Reply #11 on:** January 28, 2009, 03:40:41 PM »

Hi Scott,

I must be doing some thing wrong with the write-to-Exif feature. I started PhotoFusion, selected a track with a bunch of pictures, then had it write the GPS coordinates to the EXIF data. I did not do anything about downloading ExifTool, but in any case, the progress bar said that it had processed the pictures and was finished. In the associated picture folder, I found the modified pics, plus the originals with the extension .jpg_original. Seems OK so far.

But after downloading ExifTool and dropping an image onto the executable per the instructions, I see that the lat and lon are just listed as 0.0 Something must have been written, because if I drop an unrelated image, it does not even have a GPS entry line.

Where does TF store the exiftool.exe? I did not see it in the program files for TF? Is that the problem?

Larry

ScottMorris · « **Reply #12 on:** January 28, 2009, 03:44:59 PM »

Larry,

exiftool.exe should be in your default tracks directory, which may or may not be the Program Files\TopoFusion dir. Sounds like not in your case.

If you got .jpg_original files it is running it, but the lack of coordinates is no bueno.

I was just about to try it on my Vista machine. I'll see if there's anything different there.

Are you sure you didn't use TF's dialog to download exiftool?

ScottMorris · « **Reply #13 on:** January 28, 2009, 04:14:30 PM »

I just tried it on Vista and found that the auto-download doesn't work (regardless of what OS you are on). Something changed in the last couple days on topofusion.com that broke the exiftool download (and also GIS layers). It was a quick fix for the next version.

But anywho, I was able to write EXIF headers once I got exiftool there. Hmm.

Larry · « **Reply #14 on:** January 28, 2009, 05:44:53 PM »

Quote from: ScottMorris on January 28, 2009, 04:14:30 PM

But anywho, I was able to write EXIF headers once I got exiftool there. Hmm.

Gee Scott, I must have enabled some sort of download, because the ExifTool.exe is in the correct directory, and I did not put it there.

Does that sound familiar for me?

So it's writing headers I guess, it's just that I'm reading them as lat lon both 0.0. I'll try another track after I get back from this weeks ski camping. Priorities you know.

Larry

ScottMorris · « **Reply #15 on:** January 28, 2009, 05:50:40 PM »

Quote from: Larry on January 28, 2009, 05:44:53 PM

So it's writing headers I guess, it's just that I'm reading them as lat lon both 0.0. I'll try another track after I get back from this weeks ski camping. Priorities you know.

Absolutely! Priorities sound correct to me. Let me know what you find and I'll keep testing on my end.

Thanks Larry.

ScottMorris · « **Reply #16 on:** January 29, 2009, 12:46:44 PM »

More changes. Hopefully final ones before going with a full release.

Please let me know if you notice anything undesirable when zooming in/out with the mouse wheel. I've changed it a bit to hopefully keep it zooming under control.

Thanks

3.68 - [1/29/09] (Beta)

Photos are now automatically rotated if EXIF orientation header present
PhotoFusion HTML page generation now works even if no photos are
displayed on the screen
Fixed issues downloading exiftool.exe and GIS layers from topofusion.com
Decreased ability for mouse wheel events to queue (to prevent unintentional
scrolling if display is slow)

Larry · « **Reply #17 on:** January 31, 2009, 05:55:06 AM »

Hi Scott,

Now that I've got that important stuff done for the week,

...

V3.68 works great! All the issues above resolved on my computer. By the way, some of my earlier video related issues might be due to my using dual monitors, one 24 inches, the other 22. It is very nice by the way.

I tried writing the Exif headers on a new file, and it worked properly, wrote the lat lon as desired. This time I simply let PF reprocess all the features; photo placement as well as Exif. Don't know if it would make a difference, but on my earlier attempt, I had only the 'write Exif headers' box checked. In any case, it works now. So very cool!

BobBailey · « **Reply #18 on:** February 19, 2009, 01:38:10 PM »

I hope this is the right place to put this.

A few suggestions for PhotoFusion. All of these apply to the PhotoFusion dialog box:

Remember the setting for "Add URL prefix..."
Do NOT include the http prefix in the "Add URL prefix..." setting above
Automatically propagate the setting from .jpg path to the destination path.
Show the path like the Track File for both the .jpg path and the destination path boxes. This is a common problem in lots of apps: if the path is in MyDocs then nothing meaningful appears in the window.

Great application.

tia...Bob

BobBailey · « **Reply #19 on:** February 19, 2009, 01:46:37 PM »

Again, I hope this is the right place to put this.

A few suggestions for the HTML page generated by PhotoFusion.

An option to drop the .jpg suffix from the picture names. Saves space and makes the name more meaningful.
An option to drop the Vertical profile from the output page.
An option to include user names in the Name and URL fields.
An option to include a page title that would propagate to the Name field.

tia...Bob

ScottMorris · « **Reply #20 on:** February 25, 2009, 07:36:27 PM »

Good suggestions. We'll be working on this sort of thing again soon. Thanks.

BobBailey · « **Reply #21 on:** March 26, 2009, 07:03:31 AM »

I've been using Photofusion/Topofusion again and have some more thoughts on how to make it more [broadly] useful. I'll post a couple of times to keep the posts shorter and single topic.

I've suggested suppression of certain outputs and rejiggering of others. I've come up with two ways to make this simpler and more useful.

1. Output to a template. A template with certain defined areas such as Dreamweaver regions. This would produce a ready to use page with only the desired elements. Blogger and other tools use this approach.

2. Output snippets of HTML. This would be much simpler than the current output with toggle pages, rollovers, and thumbnails, etc. The user could then place the snippets in pages of her own design. You could even carry this so far as to include Dreamweaver region tags in a complete page:


This would allow a user to simply apply a DW template to the page.

fwiw... Bob

BobBailey · « **Reply #22 on:** March 26, 2009, 07:27:31 AM »

As I've said before PF has the potential to go way beyond photos. Many times I go for a ride and take no pictures, but I want to share the information I've gleaned with others. I do this through web pages. Consider this one:
http://ebizmax.com/Biking/RockCreekRollerCoaster/Photos/index.html
For comparison, here is the TF std output. Note that the scale box is not included and that even though the aerial map was selected the topo was output as the std map.
http://ebizmax.com/Biking/RockCreekRollerCoaster/PF_Testing/index.html

The output here was from PF and then edited. The topo map of this area is really lousy so I used the aerial, much better anyway, and included the scale box (I did this last night and this morning I can't remember for a while how I got the scale box in the first place, but that's another problem). Mostly, I deleted a lot of stuff.

The main image I had to do a screen print, edit and save, export does not include the scale box. btw, I would like to have a bolder, more defined track in this image but could not figure out a way to do it.

I continue to believe that there is a LOT you can do with the TF code with a little massaging. This is the biker and boater equivalent of Birthday Party Photo Album publishing and more.

Let me know when I can test something.

tia... Bob

ScottMorris · « **Reply #23 on:** March 26, 2009, 02:14:16 PM »

Thanks a lot for the consideration and ideas. There's definitely more to come with PhotoFusion in the near future.

Larry · « **Reply #24 on:** March 27, 2009, 05:50:04 AM »

Hey Scott,

I particularly like Bob's idea of an option to have TF use an HTML template of some sort, such that for example, the elevation profile would not be shown, etc. When it's important, I edit the TF output with an html editor, but I typically do the same edits each time. Starting with a template that I've modified would be slick.

And I agree, being able to show photos is only part of the power of this feature. It's very cool once you learn how it works.

Larry