As you may or may not know, there hasn’t been new issues of webphotomag for a long time because I am busy with writing gpuViewer, a revolutionary photo viewer.

There is now a video that explains what it is all about:

gpuViewer has a new feature to let you associate photos and places, so that you can now look for your photos in the calendar or on the map. It is available at www.gpuViewer.com

A year ago, the Paris town hall presented a superb exhibition around the work of Robert Doisneau that I reviewed here. They have now made available all the pictures online in a virtual exhibition that, I hope, will stay online for a long time because the web lacks places you can go to for reference about the work of photographers.

Make this initiative a success by visiting the Virtual Doisneau Exhibition !

Sometimes there are photographic series that are simply too goo to keep for myself.
This is one of them: runningfromcamera.blogspot.com

This is a project that has been in the making for a long while and that absolutely deserves your visit. Where webphotomag uses the analogy of a paper magazine, FineArtTV uses the analogy of TV programs and new videos are published on a weekly basis for each topic, which turns out to bring new content daily with a different topic a day!

To me, the real appeal of FineArtTV is the way these guys go after mixing quality content in a very original way. My favourite topic being “chez Higgins”, where you can expect things that are both original and fresh.

Our best wishes to the team !

Link: www.FineArtTV.tv

Tomorrow Intel Developer’s Forum starts. I’ll be running around, showing gpuViewer to whomever is interested.

The version I will show is available from www.gpuviewer.com

We’re proud to release this version today, it is available on its own site now: www.gpuviewer.com

The main new feature is a calendar view that, we hope, will change the way you browse through your pictures!
Please download gpuViewer and give us feedback !

A lot has changed in this version, not just the name!

• More cameras are recognized. DNG seems to be under control, Fuji images are now displayed at the proper angle and scale, CMYK jpegs have been fixed and, I’m expecting only few exceptions to remain. I’m aware in particular of Foveon cameras and some oddities like the PowerShot A600 that uses a CMYG pattern. If anybody would be kind enough to provide me with sample pictures, I’d be grateful. [Big thanks to Dave Coffin for putting so much effort in DCRaw !]
• The application is now all working in Unicode and folders containing characters from any alphabet can be browsed without problems any more. [Big thanks for my Corean friends for pointing this out!]
• Right-clicking on the image in full view lets you open the file in Photoshop (or whatever is setup on your machine). This makes the program a little useful, although not much yet
• Code connecting to the internet now uses libcurl instead of Microsoft’s WinINet. This won’t bring any immediate advantage to anyone yet, but makes it a lot easier to prepare for the OSX version, as all the internet related code is now platform independent. [Big thanks to the cURL team!]
• The application has now been tested on single-core, dual-core and quad-core. I’m glad to say that the multitasking engine scales well and that importing large amounts of RAW files is indeed sped up with a quad-core processor.

Things that are high on the TODO list:

• Speed up loading of first image when going from catalog to full view, this can go a lot faster.
• Calendar filter and folder selector. These will make it easier to browse large collections of photos.
• Upload to Flickr and/or Facebook
• OSX version. The main difficulty is translating DirectX calls into OpenGL, the rest is either done or should be trivial, so really it isn’t too far away. [Big thanks to ATI for making available a tool to convert shaders between the two APIs!]

As usual, I need your feedback and would appreciate if you can spread the word around you about this!

Get your version at www.webphotomag.com/wpmViewer

I’m desperately trying to address crashes that some of you are having. This version shouldn’t crash any more in instances similar to the reports that have kindly been uploaded. So, please try again and check if things are better and if they aren’t, well, please submit a report.

Pictures from Fuji camera don’t show at 45° any more, but still need to be scaled properly in “fit to screen” mode.

DNG files are still rendered completely wrong, this will be the next thing I’ll be looking at.

Download your version at this page: webphotomag Viewer

The tech preview continues with a new version that should recognize more raw formats, work on more hardware and build a catalog even faster than before: 1500 files indexed files per minute witnessed on a MacBook Pro (running XP, I’m afraid, but the OSX version is coming).

The main added feature is support for graphics cards that are limited in the texture width/height they can use. This should make webphotomag Viewer now work on most computers. This will also show large files in their entirety (the previous version used to crop photos at 4096 pixels).

A crash dump reporter has been added, so if you experience a crash, please accept the upload of the dump so we have a chance to understand what went wrong. Let us know what works for you and what doesn’t, we love feedback !

Download your version at this page: webphotomag Viewer

In october 2006, tired of waiting in front of “loading” or “refining” signs, I felt modern hardware should be able to do a faster job at displaying photos than what was done at the time. When people asked “what’s the best graphics card to use with Photoshop?”, the quick answer used to be “doesn’t matter: it doesn’t use advanced features of graphics cards”, how crazy is that? When Aperture came out, I thought times were changing and that GPU (Graphics Processing Units) would become the norm almost overnight. But not. Products like Lightroom still mostly use good old techniques and, when working with big files, it shows.

Armed with knowledge gathered during my game development years, I set out to write a viewer that would make use of the GPU and would also leverage multi-core architectures to do work in the background. After six month, results are starting to surface and I’ve reached the point where I’m happy to show a first tech demo that proves my point even if there are still delays that are longer than they should be.

I would appreciate if you could give this a test and send feedback on what works and what doesn’t. In particular, I’m looking for info on platforms where it doesn’t work and for file formats that aren’t correctly recognized.

Download your version at this page: webphotomag Viewer

This is a very exciting project for me, I hope it will be for you too.