Contribute on Ansel

Introduction

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Context

Digital photography has widely spread in the 2000’s as it allowed faster workflows and made possible to get immediate results, compared to the traditional film & darkroom workflow. But this introduced many new problems.

Firstly, analogue photographers were not necessarily accomplished lab and printing technicians, but could rely on local photo labs to get their developments and prints done. Digital photography added the burden of processing the “digital negatives” (raw files) on the shoulders of the photographers, by means of software. But those photographers didn’t usually got the appropriate training, both in digital color management and in general computer use. That pushed many of them in the hands of over-simplified software, verging on the toy side, which defined the mainstream expectation of what a digital photo editing software should be. Video editing software took another approach, being used by heavily-trained professionals in a billion-dollars industry.

Ansel target audience

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As knowing the audience is the first step of design, it is useful to define it.

The Darktable survey of 2020 showed an abnormal bias among users, favouring highly-educated men coming from technical and scientific background, and with higher programming skills than the average population. This is problematic because it does not overlap with the sociology of photographers at large (regarding computer skills as well as men/women ratio), but is a filtered subset of that social group.

Designing Ansel

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ansel is designed, not hacked. Hackers may enjoy “working” on accelerating the demise of Darktable by increasing its technical debt .

What is design ?

Design is a process by which you unroll a methodology to bring a technical solution to an human’s problem. The design process is meant to converge to the most suitable solution, while fighting the natural urge to rush into the first or the most comfortable idea.

Project organization

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The project is run by Aurélien Pierre, who tries to balance his photography work (mostly unexistent since 2019), developing & maintaining the software, and handling user education in individual training sessions. This calls for low-overhead project management strategies, relying on cloud-based collaborative tools.

Departments

Software development

Development is done on Github ,

Feature requests are not taken from users at this point. Users are consulted by the developer regarding their needs when a (re)design project is started. This is to prevent disruptive inputs at random times that would only slow-down the opened projects.

Coding style

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Values

If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it

Too much of Darktable “design” has started with “it would be cool if we could …”. I’ll tell you what’s cool : hanging good pictures of yours on your walls ASAP. Visual arts are not performing art (like music or theater), so only the result matters. Everything that comes before is overhead, and you typically want to keep it minimal. That’s not to say that the process can’t be enjoyed in itself. However, to enjoy the process, you need to master your tools and to bend them to your will, otherwise you only fight them and the whole process amounts to frustration. Problem is, Darktable “design” puts too much effort into being different for the sake of it.

Translating

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ansel uses Gettext to translate all parts of the project:

The software application (written in C),
The website (Hugo templates and Markdown content),
The documentation/user manual, inserted into the website as a module (Hugo templates and Markdown content too).

This ensures the same workflow can be used to translate all files, but also that some translated strings can be shared (for example, the translated GUI controls from the applications can be inserted directly into the documentation).

Triaging issues

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This page is written for people helping triaging issues on the issue Github tracker.

Preamble

Any project has limited resources, the difference between projects will be the threshold.
Any project should have clear goals. For Ansel, it is to manage, edit and export collections of RAW images on a desktop computer by an end-user who is not a CLI user but puts visual image quality above all else.
Any project has overhead, that is actions requested to meet the goals, although they are not directly the goal and therefore should stay minimal. For Ansel, it is the maintenance of the website, documentation, servers, nightly-built packages, code cleanups, debugging, regression tests, cross-OS support, issues triaging, etc.
Goals and overhead should be expressed in terms of tasks to perform in order to solve problems (issues). If no problem to solve, then no work to do: status quo is great too, don’t create work for the sake of it.
because of resource limitation, tasks have to be ordered depending on their priority.

The following document aims at defining this priority.

Documenting Ansel

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

There are different ways to access information :

(chrono)logical, like reading page by page, line by line, until you reach the end of the publication,
thematic, like getting to the table of contents and jumping straight to the part you are interested at, provided the content is divided into meaningful units of content,
transversal, like following a “related posts” section based on content similarity (defined manually, with tags & keywords, or learned by AI topic analysis), or explicit cross-references. For example, most websites have archives listing all pages that have a certain tag/keyword, books have glossaries.
hint-based, like presenting a bibliography of more in-depth publications or a “more info” section at the end of the content, or anticipating on later content,
source-based, following references (typically footnotes or marginnotes) to publications from where the info is extracted, mostly for verification purposes,
information retrieval, aka search engine.

You have to support all of them at once because they are complimentary and the best in context depends on the initial knowledge and needs of the reader. Not one of those ways is superior to the others. This means there is a fair deal of “keywords stuffing” to do into your writing, as to ensure that keyword-based content analysis and information retrieval by keywords will work as expected.

Democracy

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Ansel should be run democratically and fairly to everyone involved.

Defining a cooperative organization beyond open-source code

Developers and users landing here are assumed to share a common interest : they want freedom in how they edit their pictures, now and in the future. Meaning :

having a sufficient technical control over their image content and properties,
being free from capitalists who may :
- increase their application price at the sole benefit of shareholders,
- mine customer’s photos to train AI models without consent,
- extinguish applications without releasing the source code,
having a right to decide on the contours and implementation of said freedom.

Ansel DNA is more technically-minded and fined-grained than most RAW photo editors, while still emphasizing user-friendliness where it’s possible, mostly on typical desktop-centric tasks (interactions with input devices and files, GUI paradigms, etc.). Ansel is not Darktable or ART because its vision of what a good image retouching software should be is quite different.

Automated workflows

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Because Ansel is mostly a one-person operation, everything that could be automated was automated. This page keeps track of everything that should be maintained in the future, and where.

Software

Nightly builds

Nightly builds prepare a compiled and packaged version of the software, every night at 6am UTC, for:

Linux ,
Windows ,
MacOS is currently disabled.

The newest binary files are automatically added to the pre-release assets, are posted on a Matrix channel so users can subscribe to updates, and can be downloaded through (constantly up-to-date) permalinks at:

Websites

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Ansel website is built using Hugo 0.146 . This is a static website generator that allows to build very fast website from Markdown files. A custom template and a lot of custom shortcodes have been built for Ansel. You will need to install Hugo extended version on your computer first, although minor changes can be made directly to the Markdown files without building the whole website.