SeeTerra Photo Album Editor

A SeeTerra album is a directory containing JPEG images along with a few special files that describe your photos.

Making or Updating a SeeTerra album on your local machine

0. Prerequisite: Install ImageMagick and SeeTerra on your local machine (see installation)
1. Make a directory and copy there the JPEG images (files with extension .jpg, or .jpeg) that will make up your album
2. Run "Start/Programs/SeeTerra/Run SeeTerra", which should open a small browser window. Click the Browse button and select any file in a local album directory. Alternatively, enter manually the name of the album directory in the adjacent text box. In this latter case, you must end the name of the directory with /

Once you follow the above steps, SeeTerra will initialize the necessary files in your album directory and will show your album in SeeTerra View Mode. From that mode, you can enter the Edit mode by clicking on the "Edit Mode" button. In the Edit Mode you can:

• Add a description text to your photos
• Make thumbnails of your photos, for faster album viewing
• Ensure that the date and time recorded for each photo by your camera are accurate
• Record GPS coordinates so that the viewer can show the photos on Google Earth

Using the SeeTerra Edit mode

The display in the Edit mode will contain all the elements present in the View mode, and additionally you will see a number of input text boxes in the lower part of your screen.

The basic task in this mode is to enter data in these boxes, and then press "Save tags to photo". The text in the input boxes is colored red when it contains data different from what is currently stored in your photo. This text reverts to black once you save it to the photo.

At anytime you can "Reset tags", which will discard your current edits.

If the “Inherit tags” checkbox is on, then the missing tags of a photo will be copied on the form from the previously shown photo. This makes it easy to add the same description and coordinates to a series of photos.

In order to enter the geographical coordinates using Google Earth, you must be viewing the album through the SeeTerra application (see details in the viewer documentation), you must click on "See on Earth", then pan/rotate the Earth until the cross hair marker is at the desired point, then press "Get from Google Earth".

In the edit mode, the label for a thumbnail will be shown in red for those photos which do not have an up to date thumbnail. See below for how you can refresh the thumbnails.

At the bottom of the form there are two buttons for album-wide actions.

• If you press “Refresh thumbnails” and if you have ImageMagick installed then two versions of the file will be created in the same directory as the original file: A file with prefix “thumb_” which is a very small thumbnail (to be shown in the thumbnail pane), and a file with the prefix “lores_” which is suitable for web viewing. The thumbnails for a photo are recreated only if there are no thumbnails, or if the photo has changed since the thumbnails were last created. This operation can take about 1s per photo in the album, which might add up for large albums.
• If you press "Refresh catalogue" then each photo is scanned for updated tag information.

Notes:

• There are several date/time formats recognized by SeeTerra:
  • The following date formats are recognized: Dec 31, 2005 ; 12/31/2005 ; 12/31/05; 12/31/99
  • The following time formats are recognized: 16:23 (24-hour and minutes), and 16:23:15 (24-hour, minutes and seconds)
  • The date must come before the time with spaces in between
  • The date can be left out, in which case we assume today's date
  • The time can be left out, in which case we assume noon (12:00:00)
• The description can contain pretty much any ASCII characters. We have not yet tested SeeTerra on foreign character sets.
• The geographical coordinates are expressed in degrees and fractions of degrees. They are always positive, but you can select North/South for the latitude, or East/West for the longitude.

The structure of a SeeTerra album

A SeeTerra album is a directory with the following files:

• Your photos, which have all extension .JPG (or .JPEG)
• The top-level entry point, gallery.html.
• The catalogue, stored in the file photocatalogue.js, containing a summary of the tag information of all the photos in the album. This is the information that is used by your SeeTerra viewer. If you add or remove photos, or change the tag information for your photos with other application than SeeTerra, you should run a "Refresh catalogue" action.
  The catalogue file must have a precise format for SeeTerra to be able to use it. If you change it manually, make sure you obey this format:
  • There must be a line containing only “varphotos =”
  • Following that line there must be '[' followed by an array of entries separated by comma and terminated by ']'
  • Each entry is a { followed by key-data pairs, terminated by '}'
  • A key-data pair is a key follower by : and the data
  • The key and the data are strings enclosed in " ". The key might not contain spaces. Only a small number of keys have any meaning.
  • The data cannot contain newlines or carriage returns or quotes. A newline is encoded as “
” and a quote is encoded as “"” (as in XML data)
  • In each entry, there must be a key/data pair with the key “photo” and the data being the name of the photo.
• The support files, in a directory called lib. On Linux this is just a symbolic link to a local installation of SeeTerra.
• The remove-editing scripts, in a directory called cgi. This directory is needed only if the album is stored on a web server. This directory is not created on Windows, and on Linux it is a symbolic link to the local SeeTerra installation.

Moving a SeeTerra album

Once you edit the tags on your album, you might want to move it to another machine. You must copy the entire directory containing the album, except the cgi directory. You need to worry about the cgi directory only if you want to copy the album to a web server and you want the users to be able to upload photos and edit tags. In the latter case, see the installation documentation.

SeeTerra command-line options:

Copyright George C. Necula 2006