Ivy, the Taggable Image Viewer

Ivy is an image viewer that allows the user to set or remove tags that are tracked solely by the application.

Installation

Dependencies

• Racket version 6.6 and up
• gif-image
• png-image
• racquel
• riff v0.2 (which uses FLIF v0.3, see below)
• rsvg (which uses librsvg)
• sugar
• txexpr

Compilation

You actually don't need to install Ivy, per se. Simply point the Racket interpreter to the location of the main.rkt file. However, it will be easier to use Ivy if the executable is in your PATH. Compiling Ivy is simple: in the directory where you saved Ivy, you can just run

make
sudo make install

You may change the DESTDIR variable to install ivy to an arbitrary location - one that may not require super user privileges.

We provide a .desktop file, which will add Ivy to your desktop application menu. If you installed to a nonstandard location, you may need to copy ivy-image-viewer.desktop to ~/.local/share/applications/, and edit the the paths for the Exec and Icon lines. You may need to log out and log back in before your app menu will notice the new entry.

Or on Windows:

raco exe -o ivy main.rkt

This creates an executable binary (called ivy), which you can then move to any directory in your PATH. You should then be able to call ivy from anywhere.

OS X note: make will generate an .app bundle, and make install by default will place it in /Applications/.

Usage

GUI Interface

OS X note: All Ctrl- keyboard shortcuts are available as Cmd-.

• Calling ivy by itself will start Ivy with the image-viewing area blank. You can then load images from the menu (File -> Open), or with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-O.

• To load an image right away, call ivy and then the path to the image. For example: ivy "praise the sun.jpg"

• Once you have loaded an image, you can view all the other images in the same folder, cycling through the image files by either clicking on the arrow buttons or hitting the arrow keys. Pressing the Home or End keys will take you to the first and last images available respectively.

• If you want to view images from disparate locations, Ivy can also create a temporary collection, so that you only cycle through the set of images that you specified. For example, ivy ~/Downloads/cat*.jpg ~/Pictures/dog*.jpg will allow you to look at all your downloaded cat pictures and all the photos you've taken of your dog, and only those photos. (Assuming, of course, that your cat and dog pictures have "cat" and "dog" at the beginning of their filenames.) The same effect occurs when selecting multiple images from File -> Open.

• You may append files to a collection through File -> Append, or with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-O. When using the Append functionality on an empty collection (e.g. when first opening Ivy) only the files selected will be available for viewing. Appending files is also accomplished by the drag-and-drop feature: simply drag and drop images onto the canvas and they will be appeneded to the collection.

• To add a tag or list of tags to an image, simply enter them into the tag text field, separated by a comma. E.g., flower, beach, roller coaster and then press the "Set" button or the Enter key.

• If you are currently editing tags and wish to revert any unsaved changes, simply hit the Esc key. Hitting Esc when there's no pending changes to be saved will unfocus the tag text field.

• To remove any set tags, simply delete the contents in the tag text field, press the "Set" button or Enter key, and the entry for that image will be deleted.

• To set a rating for an image, simply select a number (with a neat unicode shining star) from the choice selection drop-down menu. 0 (the default) means the picture hasn't yet been rated, -1 means the image should be rejected from the rating system, and numbers 1 through 5 mean how you rate this image against its peers (with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest). This rating is also available from the Metadata Editor under the tag "xmp:Rating".

• Sorting a collection may now be done from the View menu. Available sorting methods are by alphabetical name (the default), by the highest image rating, and by the lowest image rating.

Tag Browser

Ivy comes with a tag browser mode (available from the View menu or with Ctrl-B) so that you may view every tag category and its contents. Clicking on a tag will show the images you have tagged. Clicking on the image will show a thumbnail preview which is itself clickable. Clicking on the thumbnail button will tell Ivy to load the source image for further viewing.

From the tag browser it is also possible to delete entire tag categories or rename them. Also, it is possible to edit the taglist of an image by clicking on an image path and selecting "Edit Tags" from the menu.

Animated GIF Support

Animated GIF support is currently marked as experimental. To animate a GIF, select View -> Animation. Due to the unstable nature of the related code, know that some GIF's may not load properly or at all.

FLIF Support

FLIF support is marked as experimental! To load a FLIF file in Ivy, simply open like any other image. Currently, the FLIF decoder is not optimized, so decoding takes much longer than for other formats.

Embedding Tags as XMP metadata

Ivy embeds the taglist as XMP metadata in the file itself (if that file supports XMP metadata). That way if you move your images around, the tags will stay the same. However, the information in the database will then be out of date, so it is recommended that if you move files around, utilize Ivy's command-line interface with the switch -M to ensure the changes are tracked.