New Features of MGM 1.5

Media Gallery Manager (MGM) Version 1.5 is about usability, speed, new business critical features and reliability.

I start with usability and speed because there is really a dramatically improvement over previous versions.

Usability & Speed

• Media Gallery Manager starts up in a fraction of time compared to previous versions.
• Connecting to any Zenfolio account is done in a fraction of time regardless of the number of galleries hosted on the account.
• Browsing through the tree structure of groups and galleries is dramatically improved.
• An all new and advanced caching solution provides a browsing experience for revisited galleries on Zenfolio as if they are hosted locally.
• Opening a folder on local harddrive is much faster now. This is important for slower file storages such as external harddrives and network drives.
• The speed of generating thumbnails of images on the local harddrive has been improved as well.

Creating, Editing and Deleting Groups, Galleries, Photos and Local Folders

• Create new groups and galleries on your Zenfolio account within Media Gallery Manager.
• Create new folders on your local harddrive within Media Gallery Manager.
• Modify all information fields of groups and galleries including title, caption, keywords, categories, custom reference and sort order.
• Rename local folders within Media Gallery Manager.
• Delete groups, galleries, photos on your Zenfolio account within Media Gallery Manager.
• Delete local folders and local images within Media Gallery Manager.

Integration with Image Management Tools to enhance existing Workflows

Media Gallery Manager version 1.5 can read meta-information of groups and galleries from metadata files in the folders on your local harddrive. It uses the metadata from those files to populate the information fields for newly created groups and galleries during the synchronize operations. This can be used to manage all information about groups and galleries in a local image database and then automatically create groups and galleries populated with the prepared information.

When syncing the local folder structure with the existing groups and galleries on your Zenfolio account it writes metadata files if they do not exist yet. This is especially useful to backup or sync back the information you entered in hundreds or thousands of galleries on your Zenfolio account.

Even more reliable Upload and Download of Images

The reliability of the core features, uploading and downloading of images, has been improved even more.

• On instable internet connections uploads/downloads of files are retried several times.

A lot of code in Media Galler Manager has been revamped to improve reliability and prepare the program to make adding new features even more easier.

Also other parameters have been improved:

• Communication between MGM and Zenfolio has been optimized to reduce both number of requests and amount of transmitted data.
• The memory footprint of the program has been reduced dramatically (version 1.5 uses about one fourth of memory then version 1.3.3).

The improvement of those parameters is important for Media Gallery Manager to be used as a bulk uploader running in the background.

Improvements on the User Interface to make every day use more easier

• The all new "Start Synchronization"-dialog allows to set up all synchronization options just before starting a new bulk upload/download. So it is no longer necessary to review the settings within the global settings dialog of the application beforehand. Once the preferred settings have been found they can be saved as preferred settings and are used as default settings for all upcoming synchronizations.
• The "Protocol"-panel displays log entries in different colored text to emphasize the importance of a message and to group different kind of messages. Examples are the welcome message in green, status messages about created galleries or uploaded images in black and errors on uploads/downloads in red. This useful little feature helps to find very quickly the important messages in very long protocol logs. The meaning of the colors in are:
  • Green : Information message (e.g. welcome message)
  • Black : Status message (e.g. image uploaded/downloaded successfully)
  • Blue : Summary report (e.g. for bulk upload/download)
  • Orange : Warning message (e.g. uploads/downloads canceled by user)
  • Red : Error message (e.g. failed upload/download)
• The "About"-dialog provides hot links to support and contact page of Media Gallery Manager and to the homepage of Zenfolio. It also displays 3 clocks to show the time in your local timezone the timezone of Zenfolio support and the timezone of Media Gallery Manager support.
• The "Help"-menu provides a hot link to the Help Center on the Media Gallery Manager homepage.
• On Linux MGM comes now with the GUI in native system look & feel.

Last but not least: Solved Issues from previous versions

• Thumbnails of photos from Zenfolio are now displayed with their correct colors again. This issue was introduced with the November release of Zenfolio. Since this release Zenfolio generates thumbnail files that caused troubles for the used image library. Media Gallery Manger uses now a different library to read images from Zenfolio.
• On Linux folders and image thumbnails of the local image depot are now displayed in alphanumerical sort order. In previous version folders and images were displayed in arbitrary order as provided by the operation system.

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