Fotoxx photo editor - AppImage, packed in 'portable' format...64-bit ONLY

[mikewalsh]

Morning, kiddiwinks.

Being something of a design nut, I've long appreciated Fotoxx's ability to modify images in all sorts of weird & wonderful ways. It is, however, one app that's not that easy to find useable packages that work for us here in Puppy.

The other night, I came across what seems to be a fairly recent AppImage over at AppImageHub.....so I grabbed it, and did some experimenting with it. Seems to work fine with Xenialpup64, Bionicpup64 and Fossapup64, at any rate.

Fotoxx insists on creating a "thumbnail database" of your image collection; if you don't let it, it won't fire-up. There perhaps IS a way - I seem to recall this was possible with older releases, though that option seems to have been removed in this recent build - but since I have so much storage space, I've let it go ahead and do this anyway.

A word of caution (and a bit of advice, too..!) This is one app that will definitely benefit from being run in 'portable' mode. If you have a large collection of images, as I do, the 'thumbnails' directory inside /root/.fotoxx can grow to enormous proportions (mine currently stands at almost 260 MB, representing some 35,000+ images.)

And of course, this doesn't do the 'save' any favours. So, as usual, the main 'fotoxx' config file is created & maintained within the 'portable' directory - thumbnails included - only being sym-linked out to /root/.fotoxx at run time. The sym-link is removed again at close.

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If anybody likes the sound of this, you can find it here:-

https://mega.nz/folder/mCpEUSRK#gfBcKOCe5y85d1DazOvQqA

Usual instructions apply. D/l; unzip; move anywhere you like.....preferably, outside the 'save'. Click to enter, click 'LAUNCH' to fire it up. A Menu entry can be created IF required. Simple.

Enjoy!

Mike.

[TiredPup]

With portable app extracted to /mnt/home I get this error on launch:

./LAUNCH
/initrd/mnt/tmpfs/tmp/.mount_6BhoZK/usr/bin/fotoxx: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgdk-3.so.0: undefined symbol: wl_proxy_marshal_constructor_versioned

[soniabu]

Mike, for Fotoxx appimage I have this error as the previous user I believe.
My SO is Bookworm in test.

[mikecornelison]

The fotoxx index is for both thumbnails and metadata.
It is necessary for thumbnail galleries and search functions (search using any metadata)
The index is typically 2% as large as your image collection.
On a strong computer, indexing speed is up to 10K images per minute, and this is a 1-time investment.
The current appimage can be found at kornelix.net

[dellus]

The portable doesn't launch at all, nothing happens in my fossapup64-95, nor in newer pups. I have had this in some other Mike's portables. Most do work. Gear is Dell Dimension 5150, 3GB ram.
What might be the reason?

At cornelix.net no appimages can be found nowadays.

[Geek3579]

I get the same message as soniabu in Boowormpup64_10.3

[mikewalsh]

I think the issue is definitely GTK-3.0, guys, but let me explain a bit further.

The AppImages I use in many of the portables are not produced directly by the projects in question. Rather, they're produced by the AppImage community, and much of it boils down to the skill of the individual packager.

There's one guy in particular - goes by the name of 'probono' - who is kind of like one of the grand-daddies of the AppImage community. This guy's skill is near-legendary, because he will NOT release anything until he's checked, double-checked (then checked AGAIN) that what he's created WILL run literally anywhere. Furthermore, he tests his creations on multiple distros so that he really CAN say that he's got it running on X, Y or Z FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.

This guy almost single-handedly 'wrote the book' on AppImage-building 'best practice'.

Some of the community's "wannabes" simply turn standard .deb or .rpm packages into an AppImage. Consequently, these AppImages are still hunting around the system to find their dependencies, and THAT all boils down to which distro they were packaged under as to what they're looking for...

These, I try to avoid whenever possible.

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As to the GTK-3.0 issue, many of these AppImages are a few years old now. Where I'm able to, I'll update them.....but many never get updated by the packagers. As GTK-3.0 has evolved, many of the functions on newer releases have either replaced older versions with newer abilities, or the older functions have simply been deprecated. Trying to run an older AppImage on a newer system, the apps are frequently looking for functions that simply no longer exist. And the other way round - a newer AppImage on an older system - the functions very often never existed in the first place, because at that point in time they hadn't yet been developed.

Fotoxx - or Fotocx, as it now appears to be called - was never released as an AppImage by its developer. He always builds self-contained packages that are installed, via a script, into the user's 'home' directory under '.local'.

I'm going to have a play around with the newest version and see if I can turn it into a functioning Puppy 'portable'. Don't hold your breath, but I'll see if it's possible...

Mike.