This is the old page for Chhobi. The new page is at github. This version of Chhobi is unmaintained, outdated and just a little bit smelly

Chhobi

Chhobi* is a basic photo organizing program aimed at the average home user for whom the expensive pro tools out there are over-featured and over-priced. It provides a simple interface to add keywords and captions to photos. Photos can then be searched/grouped using these keywords/captions. The keywords and caption text are stored in the image metadata following the exif/ipct standard, making them readable by many other programs that also implement this standard.
(*Chhobi means means 'Picture' in Bengali. The squiggle in the center of the logo is the Bengali letter 'chh')

Chhobi is offered to the world at no cost, as is, under the GPL. There is no warranty, either express or implied.

Features:

Keywords and captions stored in metadata using evif/ipct standard
Keywords and captions mirrored in sqlite database for fast searching
Does not alter your current photo folder organization
Automatically monitors folder(s) for new pictures to import
Drag and drop photos for immediate mailing/insert into documents
Batch resize photos for emailing etc.

!Features:

(i.e. what Chhobi does NOT do, but other photo organizers may do)

Picture touch up (red eye, arbitrary rotation, cropping - anything better done with a real image editor like the GIMP)
Backup pictures to disk
Deal with camera hardware
Upload galleries to picture sharing websites

Screenshot

Thanks

Like most open source projects Chhobi builds on other open source endevours. Chhobi depends on, is the better for, and was easy to write because of these fine pieces of open source software:

QT - from the trolls at trolltech. An amazing toolkit to write cross platform GUI programs for Mac, Linux and Windows.
Exiv2 - a well written and well documented c++ library for manipulating photo metadata.
sqlite - what a database engine! tiny, fast and is suported by QT's database classes.

Related projects on Sourceforge

Like most open source projects Chhobi has many alternatives, each with different flavours and feels. Here are those hosted on sourceforge [go].