wildframe

I’d been using Mario Westphal’s excellent Imatch Image Management software for my digital image management on windows since early 2003. Some months ago I decided I no longer wanted to use Microsoft Windows as my operating system and environment but ultimately had to resign myself to having to run my must have Imatch software in VMware. It worked quite well but it irked me having to still be tied to Microsoft Windows.

After some initial false starts trying to install and run Imatch on earlier versions of Ubuntu up to and including Edgy Eft (6.10) I decided to have another try after upgrading to Feisty Fawn a week or so ago. Talk about easy

I had already purchased an upgrade from Mario a few weeks earlier and so I used the Wine File manager to install the demo version of IMatch and simply applied my licensed update over the top and it all just worked.

Well nearly all. At his stage of testing the only thing not to have worked is right-click Image > Open which is I imagine because IMatch is looking for an external image viewing application native to windows which of course doesn’t exist under WINE. However, right-click Image > Edit serves the purpose of viewing an image anyway–so no great loss.

Batch processing works albeit not quite in the expected way. By this I mean that choosing a fixed size to export an image seems to result in it’s longest dimension being 280px unless the Adjust for Landscape Portrait Images check box is checked. I’m still to figure this out and it might just be something I’m doing wrong. However, re-sizing by percentage works fine as does applying canvas borders and text attributes to images although I haven’t checked every available combination thereof.

All tool bars, scroll bars, buttons and window borders lay out correctly albeit there does seem to be some minor transparent buffering at the top of some windows where the screen from any previously used workspace seems to show through but for the most part I hardly notice it. All menu drop down menus respond quickly except for the scripting menu for some reason and the right-click image pop-up menus seem a little retarded but not excessively slow. One click re-scan worked very quickly scanning some 20,000 images along with some mods and errors for invalid file formats in around 8 minutes including several new folders with 4mb images being processed in around 1/3 to 1/2 of a second each on my Dell D800 1.5Ghz notebook with 1Gb RAM with several other applications already running in other workspaces. Importing EXIF data took around 30 seconds.

The few scripts I have run including HTML Slideshow and Photo Gallery Creator worked flawlessly except that the Photo Gallery Creator only created clones of the index page thumbnails but again perhaps this was just me.

All in all it’s a very practical and speedy application on WINE installed on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn–your mileage may vary. Feel free to ask any questions about feature performance and if possible I will test it for you on my install.

If I could only get PhotoShop CS3 running under wine I could abandon my VMWare sessions completely–sigh.

~ by John Mackay on June 2, 2007.