Clepsydra 0.8 review

Clepsydra is a free web application for managing a numeric data collection (it's pictures centric, but can also store other type of c

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 20158K Developer: Jean-Yves Sironneau

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Clepsydra is a free web application for managing a numeric data collection (it's pictures centric, but can also store other type of content).

Clepsydra allows you to share your documents over the internet. So you don't have anymore to send your pictures by email or to check ten different web sites to look at the pictures of the same wedding.

Different people contribute by adding their pictures or documents and the other users can look at them, search for them, view a satellite map containing them or display a slide show. Instead of trying to collect all the pictures from you friends and family, you can just manage them in a central server, and publish them to everybody easily in one shot.

But if you want to look only at the pictures you took it's real easy too. The goal is that each one is not running it's own gallery system, but instead one gallery system is used by everybody.

Here are some key features of "Clepsydra":
Create document bases that will contains documents and all related entities and are isolated from each other
Import documents one at a time, or by uploading a zip file containing documents.
Describe your documents by name, description (rich text), significance, keywords, event, location, authors, people (that are appearing on a picture for example), date.
Automatic detection of mime type to guess if it's a photo or a video document for example
For photos thumbnail creation, rotation and automatic date detection for pictures that contains EXIF data
Creation of locations, events, persons and arbitrary keywords that will be assigned to documents
Search of documents using all the defined attributes, for example all picture of ren?e and that were taken in the caucasian area, searches can be saved to create "virtual collections" of pictures. That is to say you can save a search for all the pictures of a new family baby and then have a dynamic collection of this pictures that will reflect the pictures of that baby after you saved your search, then you can see a slide show of this pictures for example.
User management and permissions, users are people that can connect to the application, they can have different permissions on each document base : viewer, contributor, administrator, and they can choose the language they want the application to be localized in.
Configurable e-mail notification support to be warned when new pictures are added to a base, and when an error occurs
E-mail support to send documents by this media
Printing support to send pictures to printing services (really early stage for that feature, not usable yet)
Map support to see your documents on a map, by defining a tree of geolocalized locations, so you can see a satellite map of the locations from one of your trip and the pictures located there
Slide show
Localization is supported (for now french, english and partially italian)
From a technical point of view clepsydra is following the MVC principles, so one can use the data API without the web interface, to automate tasks, or build a new user interface on top of the api. Unit tests are used to test the API so they're examples of how to use it. For now just one content transformer (image rotation) is implemented, but it's a matter of implementing an interface to add a new one.
Everything is stored in the database even the content of the documents so it's pretty simple to save and restore an instance of the application, and data integrity can be better checked.