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First, before I forget, a short disclaimer: I wrote this program to the best of my abilities and with best intentions. Nonetheless it probably still contains some bugs, some of which may only show under very special circumstances. I'm almost sure none of those bugs will do harm to you, but I can never be 100% sure. So you have to run PictureRelate on your own risk.

Now that you know, you can download the program itself. It comes with a small install/uninstall program, so it should be really easy to use. After installing, you have to load images into the program. You can load whole directories by opening a single picture from that directory. Or you can drag and drop pictures into the program. If you want more control about what pictures to load, you can create a text file with one filename per line and load it. Let me know if you experience any problems.


Version 2.6.4 hotfix alpha

With Firefox 18 SendToPictureRelate stopped working, displaying the following message: "Error: Not enough arguments [nsIWebBrowserPersist.saveURI]"
Searching the web showed that Firefox developers changed their API in a non-compatible way, and it appears they are even proud of doing so. Unfortunately intelligible information about how to pass a meaningful value to this new "safety relevant" parameter is not supplied. It's sad the change is important enough to Firefox developers to break the API, but not important enough to document it in a way understandable to add on developers, e.g. by supplying some examples. However rumor from some forum indicates the parameter is irrelevant for add ons, so I set it to "null". Now it appears to work as before, as far as I can see.

If you would like to try this hotfix version 2.6.4. as an alpha release, here it is:

http://www.walthelm.net/picture-relate/download/setup-picture-relate-264.exe (English)
http://www.walthelm.net/picture-relate/de/download/setup-picture-relate-264-de.exe (German)

Please let me know if it works ok; then I will submit it to the download archives.

Version 2.6.3

Over the last Months some small but possibly helpful changes have accumulated. And finally I found a quiet Sunday to go through the process of releasing an update version in two languages.

If you are interested in the details, here is how this works: first I check if all changes are checked in into source control. Usually there are some open points for which I then have to decide and test if they are good enough to be included in the next version, or if they should be reworked for the next version or even discarded as failed experiments. Then the version number must be updated at a dozen places. Then I compile the English version as a setup.exe package. Next I generate the German version via a script. If new texts have been added or if old texts have been changed, I have to update the NLS translation configuration accordingly and generate again. Then I compile the German version as a setup.exe package. After that I do a few plausibility checks if everything looks ok. If not, it can happen the whole procedure starts again from the beginning.

Then the publishing starts for real. I copy the packages onto the download location of the web server using a FTP tool. Then I retrieve the current state of the PAD XML files from the web server, update them and upload them again onto the server. PAD files are the means to notify download archives on the internet about the new version. Editing the PAD files is a pain. I can choose between a cumbersome UI tool or manual editing of XML text. Quite bureaucratic and about as entertaining as declaring taxes; but at least that way all archives offering PictureRelate will know.

Theoretically PAD files support multiple languages. Practically the support is quite limited and half hearted. Many download archives have troubles with multiple languages. For example it seems that PAD files have no way to specify different download locations for different languages. While I was learning about these problems, PAD files were created and submitted from half a dozen locations on my web site. Finally I ended up with just two different variants, but to notify all archives I have to copy these to all the locations.

Sorry, I no longer send notification emails to users. PictureRelate can check its PAD files in the internet; e.g. try the Check Updates funktionality every few months...

Finally this download page has to be updated, including a list of changes. Again this has to be done in two languages. While it sometimes is fun to "blog" about the new version, saying it all again in a different language is always tedious. But enough of that. Here is the list: Hopefully now I succeeded in publishing the new version and everything works at least as good as in the last version. If not, let me know (and use the previous version—link at the bottom of this page—until I find the time to publish a fix version).


PictureRelate 2.6.2 was triggered by the insane release policy of Firefox. I'm starting to regret having written the add-on. Firefox refuses to run add-ons that have not been approved for this version. In other words: instead of developing carefully and backwards compatible the Firefox developers push the burden of testing and fixing to the add-on developers. If this is necessary once a year, ok, that may be called reasonable effort. Even though freeware lives from participation of users, so would it be really too much to ask for users to try for themselves if their new version of Firefox is good for their add-ons?

Anyway, Firefox decided to accelerate their versioning. Where there was a new major version ever one or two years, now they push out new "major" versions every few months. Instead of calling their versions 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.8.1 etc. they now call them 4, 5, 6, and 7.

Ok, so I tested SendToPictureRelate with the available pre-release versions up to 7 alpha, and guess what - no changes necessary, except for changing the maximum supported version to 7. What a waste of my vacation time...

Good news for you is, I decided going through the packaging process just for this alone is not worth it and added a few days of bug fixing and feature developement. The most requested feature covered are larger thumbnail images. See the following screenshots:

thumbs of wallpapers - 100%
thumbs of wallpapers - 125%
thumbs of icons - 100%
thumbs of icons - 50%
thumbs of icons - 50%, small pictures zoomed

Quite a difference, right?

Here the full list of changes:
Have Fun!



PictureRelate 2.6.1 is again a collection of fixed and improvements of the last months. Nothing urgent, except for adaptions for Firefox 4 for the add-on. There were also some improvements for the add-on, so if you haven't used it yet, give it a try. The improvements are:

PictureRelate SendToPictureRelate (the Firefox add-on) Whew! So that's about it. Now I feel like writing this list took longer than implementing it, but well, no, not true. Its just much more a chore to do the publishing than to do the programming, for which I find too little time too. However there has been some encouragement and it seems PictureRelate is still in use. Thanks for all your feedback and have fun :-)




PictureRelate 2.6.0 contains the fixes and improvements I did over the last years. A lot of them are minor, so I took my time to do the next release. However, as there are still people downloading licences, I know PictureRelate is useful. Thank you for your feedback and encouragement! And apologies for not always responding to all of your emails; sometimes I just can't find the time. But finally, now, I took the time to assemble a package and called it 2.6.0. The major improvements are:
My internal list of changes has about 70 entries, but most of them pretty technical and to most of you they wouldn't mean much, I guess.



PictureRelate 2.5.1 has the following changes.



Once more it is time for a new release. I was hoping to go to version 3.0 in a major leap, but things got complicated and wishes from users accumulated. So here is version 2.5.0, which is "half way" to 3.0.

Excerpts from the changes log for PictureRelate 2.5.0

URL support

Exclude some pictures from Search Similar

Improved Search Similar
GUI

Help
Search Duplicates:
Misc.

Some TCP implementations; some still experimental




It's time to release the next version of PictureRelate. Thanks to all of you who encouraged me to maintain this utility. But appearantly there is no way to make a living from PictureRelate, so now it's donation-ware. I still keep the licensing system, because its easier not to change it than to spend more days on deactivating it. Furthermore my PAD-Gen utility has no "donation-ware" category, so it's probably still called shareware on most software sites. I'll continue to support and develop PictureRelate strictly on a spare-time basis. Of course the more people give positive feedback, the more time I will spend.

To give you an idea how much work such a "little" utility is: the source code now contains more than 40.000 lines of code. Imagine you have to write an essay of that length... It would already be a book. That's what it takes to program a high performance utility like PictureRelate.

Here is a short overview of what is new in version 2.0.6:

Here is a short overview of what was new in version 2.0.5:

The current version of PictureRelate is 2.6.3

English: Windows, any flavor, as far as I know (0.6 MB exe-file)
German:
 Windows, alle Versionen, würde ich sagen (0,6 MB Exe-Datei)
other languages:

 If you would like to translate PictureRelate into your mother language, contact me.
UNIX, Linux:
 User reported PictureRelate can run on Linux using the free Wine program.



  Conservative users can also download old version 2.6.2: English and German
  Even more conservative users can also download old version 2.0.6: English and German
  Sometimes I create an alpha release version for someone to test. Try it if you like (but check if it really is newer).