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How to use plugins

Using a simple mechanism you can start external programs with arguments related to the files in your album. It may be used to start external viewers (with special features or for files which fotoalbum is not able to display), editors or your calendar application showing the date a picture was taken, for example. The plugins can be applied to single files or to a set of selected files.

Files describing plugins can reside in your home directory (~/.Fotoalbum/plugins/ on a linux system) or in a system wide directory (depends on installation, see "Help/About"). The system wide directory contains some examples.

Please take a look at an example file (you can edit it using your favourite ASCII editor) and read this text.

Every plugin has some mandatory attributes:

Arguments

You need to give arguments to external programs to take advantage of them. Some tags inside of the argument will be replaced by special values. Tags and values are:

Use " to include a ".

Blacklists and whitelist for plugin selection based on file suffix

Each plugin can optionally have entries to describe the file types to which it can be applied. Again, take a look at the example file, it is easy to understand.

Usage examples

There are uses besides picture handling, some are shown in the example file: starting external applications to view movies or to view/edit CAD files.

There is an example you might not think of: start a calendar program (in this case: MuPO) to display the day at which a picture was taken. This way I can easily check if there are additional comments in my calendar describing an event or something like that.

Please send me an email with your plugin configuration so that I can include them to fotoalbum for others!


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