If you're a fan of digital photography, you'll often take multiple shots of the same subject with slightly different settings to be able to later choose the best picture. You can find it by browsing through all the photos. But when you find it, what were the settings you used after all? Did they improve as the exposure time grew longer? Or was the ISO speed the most important factor? To better get an idea of how the different camera settings influenced your images, the easiest way would be to have them laid down side by side, sorted according to those settings. Then, a quick visual scan might suffice to tell you what influence a particular setting had (all the more so if you are still learning). PhotoProbe is an application that allows you to do just that: compare different photos with different settings in an immediate, straightforward way.

You can find the distribution of PhotoProbe in two different versions: an 'easy to install' windows version, and a generic version for other systems and more 'computer-savvy' users.

Instead of using the HTTP server provided with the PhotoProbe distribution, you should be able to run it using another HTTP server (such as Apache and the like). Just place either the 'pmmain.exe' or the 'pmmain.py' files and the 'pmconf.txt' configuration file somewhere on your site and access them with your browser. When using the source code file you might need to edit the first line to inform the server where the Python interpreter is (and, of course, the server must be properly configured to accept Python CGI scripts). The serevr must also have write permissions on the directory where you placed 'pmmaim.py' or 'pmmain.exe'.

In the Explorer Pane, you can choose a photo EXIF attribute for each axis (horizontal and vertical). When you press the 'Go!' button, the table with all the photos will be redrawn to reflect your choices. In each table cell you can find a checkbox. If you press the 'Filter!' button, you'll start exploring only the photos on the cells where the checkbox was checked. A '(...)' link appears in the cells where there more images belong than those allowed max. number of images per cell setting (see below). Press it to see all relevant images. You can then press the 'Back...' links to continue exploring your photos.

The Photos Pane allows you can select what files you want to explore. Enter a directory path and press 'Scan Dir!' to see all photos located there. You can further filter them by unchecking the respective checkboxes and pressing 'Update!'.

All images and image names are clickable, leading to a page where the full-sized image is displayed, along with its histogram and a list of all the EXIF information found in it

Finally, in the Configuration Pane you can change the various settings of the program. You can choose the size of the thumbnails, in pixels, and the size of the full-sized images. Also configurable is the maximum number of thumbs per cell in the explorer pane. These settings might help you prevent the clutter that sometimes arises when dealing with large numbers of photos. You can also choose what port the PhotoProbe server should be serving to (if you're unsure of what this means, leave this setting alone). Also, you can select the brand or model of the digital camera with which the photos you're exploring were shot. This will allow PhotoProbe to extract maker-dependant information from the photos and enhance the ways in which you can compare them. Finally, there are several skins you can choose to change the appearance of PhotoProbe.

Just below the main configuration area, you can also see the current thumbnail cache size. If you feel it is getting too large, just presse the 'Clean Cache!' button. Any thumbs that are needed will automatically be regenerated. If you can afford the space, and often probe the same sets of photos, then don't clean it, as generating the thumbnails can be a time-consuming process.

To exit, use the 'Shutdown PhotoProbe' link on the top-right of every page.

Some upcoming features:

• Add templates to extract information from photos taken by other cameras.
• Make starting the program more user-friendly (a shortcut? batch file? another script?)
• Preventing multiple instances of the server
• Much, much more...

v0.6.1 - 11/8/2003

Solved bug: last cell ignored while filtering out photos on the 'Explore' pane.

New skins: Fire and Ice.

v0.6 - 7/8/2003

New skin: Halloween

Now stores all thumbs in the same directory, to allow the exploring of photos on non-writable media (CDs, etc.) and to prevent the proliferation of '.pp_thumbs' directories everywhere. Furthermore, now the thumbs expire if the original photo was changed.

The skins are now read from a special-purpose dir.

v0.5.1 - 30/7/2003

Solved bug related to running PhotoProbe from directories with spaces in the name.

v0.5 - 30/7/2003

New skins: Sunny Day, Line Art, Underwater

Skins are no longer hard-coded, but listed in the 'skins.txt' file instead.

In fullsize view, you can now see the image's histogram.

Now correcly encodes urls for file names with special chars.

New directory browser can be used to select location of photos instead of filling it by hand

v0.4 - 25/7/2003

PhotoMatrix is now Called PhotoProbe (there already was a 'PhotoMatrix' at Sourceforge

The project is now located at Sourceforge

New parameter to control the width of the original photos when displaying them

Added support for older Nikon photos (not all work though. Nikon 4300 produces weird results)

Now displays EXIF data on the fullsize views and on the pics. tooltips.

Now displays a small thumb near the name of a file in the 'Files' Pane.

Shutdown now displays a friendlier goodbye message

New skin: Strawberry

v0.3.1 - 24/07/2003

Solved minor bugs relating to table formatting in the 'Photos' pane

Now you can click on thumbnails and photo names to get the full version.

v0.3 - 24/07/2003

First public release