Now I’ve actually got round to uploading some pictures, I’ve actually found one of the enhancements in my upgraded Gallery2. This isn’t something visitors will notice, but it does make a routine task quicker and easier, which is definitely a Good Thing.

When you look in my gallery, you’ll see that each picture or album is represented by a square thumbnail image, which Gallery creates for me automagically. And a lot of the time, it makes a pretty good job of it. But for perhaps a quarter of my pictures, I need to change the crop used for the thumbnail to make it look better, or to avoid having a statue’s head cut off, for instance. Now up till now, the cropping tool has been a Java applet. This used to be slow to load, didn’t update the screen very quickly, and was generally icky. In the latest release, the Java thing has gone, and in its place is a far more responsive draggable frame. I haven’t looked into how it’s done, as I’ve been too busy appreciating the fact that it has been done. Nice.