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#1 2013-03-09 19:13:46

Thrall
Member
Registered: 2012-04-24
Posts: 15

RefImage - Obtain and view reference images

This is probably something of a niche program. It was essentially designed to do one thing: To allow me to quickly find reference imagery for drawing and painting, then to display it in such a way as to get as many useful images on the screen as possible.

RefImage is a Qt gui application. Since the arrival of Qt5 in the repos, I have updated the master branch to use Qt 5. A Qt 4 compatible version lives on (for now) in a branch named 'qt4'.

The source can be found on github: https://github.com/Thra11/RefImage
PKGBUILD files (one for qt5, one to build with qt4) can be found here.
A long waffly explanation with some screenshots can be found here (Note this post is pre-qt5, so some information is now outdated).

Instructions for building and using it are included with the source. Help using it is also available from the help menu in the application.

Thanks in advance for trying it out! (and any constructive feedback)

Last edited by Thrall (2013-03-09 19:15:13)

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#2 2013-03-09 19:59:22

Šaran
Member
From: Bosnia
Registered: 2011-09-03
Posts: 407

Re: RefImage - Obtain and view reference images

This is going to be REALLY useful and my sister who draws a lot says thanks.

But I have noticed few problems in qt5 branch.
1. New tab, fullscreen and clear all buttons aren't visible.
2. Sometimes it doesn't fully load images.
taHBjcA

And how to load saved session? It loads saved images correctly through Open directory, but session.dat isn't recognized.

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#3 2013-03-09 20:30:50

Thrall
Member
Registered: 2012-04-24
Posts: 15

Re: RefImage - Obtain and view reference images

Šaran, firstly, Thanks for trying it!

1. The buttons are meant to have icons, but there are issues with Qt detecting the system's icon theme. When I tried with qt5, I found it substituted some (rather unattractive but usable) icons of its own from somewhere when it failed to detect the theme, so I assumed qt5 was providing fallback icons and removed my custom fallback code. I guess it's time I did this properly and included icon resources with the source for use when system icons aren't available.

2. I'm not sure exactly what's going on with the partly loaded images; I have never seen this issue myself. I will attempt to make the program more verbose if problems occur when downloading, in the hope that it will shed more light on the problem.

3. The saving and loading sessions feature is currently unfinished. The "Save session" button will save all the images in the same folder as session.dat, but the session.dat file is actually just garbage at the moment. As a workaround, you can load all the images from the folder using File>Open Directory... When I have finished this feature, there will be a "Load Session..." menu entry to load the session file.

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#4 2013-03-13 19:50:07

Thrall
Member
Registered: 2012-04-24
Posts: 15

Re: RefImage - Obtain and view reference images

I've now pushed several updates to the source code, including:

  • It is now possible to save a session and reload it from the save file. If you have to close RefImage, but want to carry on using the same reference images later, this should make it very easy to do so. Simply use "Save session..." to save the session, then "Load session..." to load it again. It will save separate thumbnail and image files to avoid re-downloading them later, along with a "session.dat" file which stores how everything was arranged. If using local images, a copy of the image file is not saved (it just reloads the original), but the generated thumbnails are, to avoid regenerating them every time.

  • Thumbnails show download progress while downloading the image.

  • Qt5 branch falls back to Oxygen icon theme if it can't detect the system theme.

  • More error dialogs when things (mainly network errors) go wrong.

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