At long last, I finally finished the latest update to my Flickr photo management application. I had planned to finish this release weeks ago, but took a few detours, had some job interviews, and a vacation. Sorry about that In any case, there’s quite a bit that’s new in this release, and overall, it should provide a MUCH better user experience than 0.4.

The download link is at the bottom of this post.

Release Notes:

• New Photo Caching System: Behind the scenes, this version is much more organized and efficient about downloading preview images from Flickr. You should be able to scroll the main photos view and move around the application with ease. Or, at least, any problems you have while scrolling, clicking, and moving won’t be caused by the caching system!
• Improved Photo Details: The photo details pane now lays itself out dynamically depending on its content. If you have lots of tags, the tags box will correctly resize to fit them. Same principle with the photo description. The date listings are also more intelligent with multiple photos selected. Hooray for Cocoa Bindings and a simple value transformer!
• Drag & Drop: Wooohoo! You can now add photos to Favorites, Photosets, and Groups just by dragging them onto the appropriate item. Flickr has some rules – for example, you can’t add your own photos to your Favorites, or somebody else’s photos to one of your Photosets, and Mugshot will respect that.
• Photo Removal / Delete: Although Mugshot does not yet allow you to completely delete photos from your Flickr account, you can un-favorite, remove photos from sets, and remove photos from Groups just by selecting them and hitting the Delete key! (This goes hand-in-hand with Drag & Drop).
• Automator: Mugshot comes bundled with Download Color Field Images, an Automator action that allows you to select a color and download images whose average color matches your selection. It’s based on the same engine as Mugshot and it’s part of the Mugshot app, so launch Automator and give it a try.
• Database Updates: Quite a few changes to CoreData store that should improve speed a bit for most operations.
• Performance Improvements: Besides the new caching system and the database updates, Mugshot generally uses CoreData a little more wisely, which means a few speed improvements in general. I still need to do quite a bit of work in some areas, though.
• Universal Build: This version is a Universal build, so it should run natively on Intel Macs. However, I don’t have one to test it on, so try it at your own risk.
• Better Status Reporting: Previous versions didn’t do any status reporting, so this version is definitely an improvement.
• Window and Source List Updates: I’ve been playing with the overall window style and layout quite a bit for this version. Instead of an outline view for the source list, it now uses several tables. More notes on the window style below.
• Smart Crash Reports: Mugshot will use it if you’ve already got it installed.

In addition to all the improvements, there’s also a couple things I’m still working on – but hey, it’s version 0.5, so you expected that, right?

• No Undo Support: This is a big one – especially considering all the draggin’ and droppin’ and deletin’ that 0.5 allows. Just be aware that any changes you want to undo, you’ll have to do yourself. For example, if you remove some photos from a Photoset, you’ll have to drag them back in from your stream – you can’t just click Undo.
• Window Style: In the long run, I will probably switch back to an outline view for the source list. And, after playing with the whole “black and red, dark, Mugshot look”, I will probably switch to a much more standard window style in the future. I’m not sure when I’ll get around to finishing that and getting rid of the current look, but in the long run, that’s the direction I’m headed.
• iPhoto Import: There were quite a few changes to AppleScript support in iPhoto ‘06, so until I can get a set of scripts out that (a) properly detect which version of iPhoto a user is running and (b) properly handle the particular features in that version of iPhoto, I’ve turned off iPhoto importing. The button is still there, but it doesn’t do anything.
• Creating New Photosets: There is no way to do this yet in Mugshot. I know that drag & drop photo management is a little less useful without this, so I will add it at some point.
• Photo Descriptions & HTML: Photo descriptions do not properly display HTML right now.
• Performance: There’s still quite a few areas that need performance improvements. For example, Mugshot doesn’t fetch most details for a photo until you select it, so selecting a lot of photos all at once can make everything stutter a bit.
• Console Messages: You’ll still get quite a few. Some are by design, some aren’t. As I implement a preferences and debug pane, you’ll be able to turn off the intentional ones.
• CoreData Validation Errors: Please let me know if you get any of these. Some people have reported them occasionally with this build, but I haven’t been able to reproduce it. You can leave a comment on this post or send an email to the address in the About box.

You can download Mugshot 0.5 here or from the Downloads page.