Graphical File Revision Control for Non-Techies?

EagleEyez asks: "Packages like Subversion and CVS are great for code and version control for programmers and developers, but what about for design and creative teams? I'm trying to help my company streamline part of the creative process, but haven't seen a software package that does version control, check-in/out, e-mail notifications, etc. that is specifically tailored toward images and basic HTML content. Full fledged document management tools might work, but they seem a bit much and tend to focus more on office docs. Does anyone have any recommendations?" There are a few projects moving in this direction, they just may not be as usable as some would like. More detail in the full article.

Photographers (those using digital cameras or film photographers who edit their photos on computer) might also find revision control useful. From bmcent1: "As an amateur photographer seeking a way to better organize files, it occurred to ask Slashdot: 'What methods are digital photography enthusiasts using to organize the torrent of files that build up over time?' I'm a huge Linux fan, and although I use Photoshop, I would like to use a Linux storage server as the back end and could use Linux EXIF/IPTC tagging tools such as XnView to help organize if they perform as well as commercial products like IMatch.

What tools do you use? How do you manage your workflow and the files that build up as a result? I shoot RAW and keep the original. Post processing usually produces a .PSD file and then any crops are kept separate in case I want to adjust and reprint later. This means a minimum of three files per image and more if I have different crops.

Have people successfully used versioning file systems like EXT3COW or revision control systems like Subversion as an aid to their digital photography workflow?"

Tortoise

[AKAImBatman]

Allow me to solve your problems right now:

http://tortoisecvs.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] (For CVS Servers)
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ [tigris.org] (For Subversion servers)

Tortoise will tell your users everything they need to know about the files status right through Windows Explorer. Teaching them how to do checkins and tree updates is also quite easy, thanks to the customized right-click menu. Advanced options like diffing, merging, and branching are still available through the submenus, but your users should be able to get their work done without resorting to those. (At least, not until they're ready.)

Of course, the fact that these are graphics designers may complicate issues somewhat. If they're using a Mac, they won't be able to use Tortoise. In which case, my next recommendation falls on SmartCVS:

http://www.smartcvs.com/ [smartcvs.com]

SmartCVS is great for Macintoshes, although it does take slightly more training than Tortoise. The only problem you may run into, however, is that SmartCVS chokes on massive directories of files. I don't know if this problem has been fixed or not, but it was a serious problem for one of the source trees I worked on. (Think gigabytes of data spread across thousands of files.)

CVS/SVN are by no means perfect solutions, but I can't think of anything better off the top of my head. Hope this helps!

Re:Tortoise

[Kristoffer Lunden]

I've had at least one very non-techie customer in a project working with us remotely via TortoiseSVN and that worked just fine. It's by no means as good as it could be (for this use), but if you can set it up for them and explain Commit and Update, you are probably set.

Subversion

[the eric conspiracy]

Is your friend. Very happy with binary files (in fact it treats binary and text the same and uses a binary diff algorithm). Lots of hooks to add pre-post processing so you can do whatever you want in terms of extracting file data.

CVS is binary-stupid - if you have a lot of binaries it is really ineffecient.

Version Cue

[DingoBueno]

Well...since you already use photoshop, I'd have to suggest Version Cue [adobe.com]. It's made precisely for your purpose. I've used subvserion, myself. But I've also fought and lost the same battle when it come to non-techie conversion. Best of luck...

no cvs but svn is cool

[jilles]

I would say subversion is adequate for version management (not perfect). It fullfills the minimum requirements of a versioning system. CVS on the other hand is unreliable, not really suitable for non ascii content, prone to losing version history on normal development activity such as e.g. refactoring, unable to keep track of changes that concern multiple files and unable to keep track of normal file operations such as directory creation, moving and deletion. Just a few of the reasons why you should no longer use CVS if you care about such things as repository integrity, keeping track of changes in the repository, storing binary content, refactoring your code, etc. If you do care about these things, avoid CVS like the plague. But then why use versioning at all if you don't care about these things? CVS is better than nothing and and svn is way better than that.

Tortoise CVS on windows does a good job of hiding most of the uglyness to end users, it does not actually solve them and users might be tempted to think that storing e.g. large word documents in cvs is good practice. TortoiseSVN, a frontend for subversion similar to TortoiseCVS provides a similar frontend for subversion. Having used both, I would say that the svn version is more feature rich, more actively developed and has the advantage of running on top of a version system that doesn't have any of the problems listed above.

To get started with subversion locally, all you need is tortoise svn. Simply right click on a folder and create a repository and then right click on another folder to add its contents to the newly created repository (using the file:// protocol). If at a later stage you decide you want to share the repository over a network, you can do so with e.g. cygwin ssh + cygwin subversion using the svn+ssh:// protocol. The tortoise svn repository will actually be compatible with that. Alternatively you can set up an apache server (http:/// [http] or svnserve (svn://). For small scale sharing, svn+ssh is easier since it requires nothing more than installing subversion, getting the ssh server going and managing ssh users (which in cygwin are normal windows users).

Due to subversions excellent support for normal file operations, you can actually have only one repository for multiple projects. For example apache projects share the same subversion repository.

Because it is so easy to set up, subversion is really suitable for working on a bunch of files together with others. I use a local repository for working on my work documents and small projects. I even put photo's in subversion. Having a central repository makes it easy to backup as well. This style of working with subversion is reasonably efficient for binary files where the binary diff from version to version is relatively small too. For example, I keep my word documents directory in svn. The total size of an export of this directory is 10 MB. The subversion repository on disk containing the full version history of these files is 5 MB. Compression + storing only binary diffs are the reason that the repository size on disk is actually less than an export of the head of the repository!

Alienbrain

[Animats]

The commercial leader in graphical content management revision control is Alienbrain [alienbrain.com]. It was originally developed for video game development, where there are many types of unusual graphical assets, from motion capture data to level maps, all with multiple revisions. Now that Avid has purchased Alienbrain, it's also being used for TV and film animation projects.

As with most Avid products, if you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it.

Try LibreSource and so6

[maxme]

Try LibreSource and the so6' version management system.
http://www.libresource.org/ [libresource.org], it's free, and there is a graphical java webstart client really simple to use.

--
Maxime Biais

Consider Sharepoint

[Anonymous Coward]

It might be a bit too advanced for you still, but consider running Microsoft Sharepoint or getting yourself setup with a hosted Sharepoint system. If you are running Small Business Server 2003 or Windows Server 2003, you should have it already installed and setup...

Jason R. Shaver

Surround SCM by Seapine Software

[JSBiff]

Let me start this with a disclaimer. I *am* an employee of Seapine Software, so I'm not exactly a dis-interested third party.

I work on the helpdesk for Seapine Software [seapine.com], a small software company that, for a decade, has concentrated on providing easy to use software for managing software development. One of our products is a GUI (we also provide a CLI as part of the package for those who need it) version control system, called Surround SCM [seapine.com]. It is cross platform, supporting Windows, Linux, Solaris, and MacOS X for both the server and the client.

It is quite feature rich, and specifically, handles versioning of image files very well. It can be used to version any kind of file (text and binary alike), so it can be used outside of the Source Code Management market, that just happens to be our current target market. It is not Free/Open Source software, but compared to other commercial SCM/FVM (Source Code Management/File Version Management) offerings on the market, is very competitively priced.

As I work on the helpdesk, I get a good idea of the relative quality of our products (believe me, products that aren't very good aren't very pleasant to support), and Surround SCM is, from my perspective, a very strong product. We offer a trial download that you can use to evaluate the product for a month, to see if it fits your needs.

Subversion + Tortoise Setup Guide

[fbg111]

And here's a guide [vertigosoftware.com] for setting up Subversion and Tortoise on Windows, really easy.

Re:What I use

[Triddle]

If you use SVN with DAV via Apache then the files in the repository are directly visible as a URL, so viewing a file is as simple as pointing your browser at the repository and traversing the tree of links. No checkout required and you guarantee you are viewing the latest version by avoiding stale local data.

Re:MediaWiki

[*BBC*PipTigger]

If you are (or someone you know is) moderately familiar with Perl, I would highly recommend http://twiki.org/ [twiki.org] over MediaWiki.

TWiki supports standard XHTML 1.0 in combination with traditional wiki-style markup (e.g., *important text* for bold in TWiki as opposed to '''important text''' as bold in MediaWiki).

TWiki runs via standard CGI scripts and uses an RCS back-end for tracking document revisions and facilitating roll-backs.

TWiki was designed to support a thorough plug-in architecture and a great deal of the functionality included in the latest stable release (TWiki-4.0.1 from 07 Feb 2006) is provided through plug-ins.

There are lots of skins too (driven by CSS) which are easy to install if you don't like the default.

I've recently gotten into deploying and administrating installations of both TWiki and MediaWiki. I have also been modifying lots of the code of each while working in Sony's R&D department. Management decided to abandon MediaWiki (and possibly also Confluence shortly) in favor of TWiki's advantages. I'm working on some specialized new plug-ins for our intranet to aid project management. I highly recommend TWiki for collaborative web pages where you might want to extend the functionality.

MediaWiki is simple and clean and very well-suited to encyclopedic content. If that fits your problem-domain (i.e., you don't need to make substantial functional enhancements), it is a nearly ideal choice.

This http://wikimatrix.org/compare/MediaWiki+TWiki [wikimatrix.org] site can be extremely helpful in evaluating wiki alternatives too.

I hope that helps. =)

-Pip

Saving editing changes separately from the file

[orenh]

Instead of saving an entire copy of the file after every modification, my company has an application called Centico Photo Album that saves only the original version of the file, and then a list (in a database) of all the editing changes that had been made to it. See http://www.centico.com/cpa/ [centico.com]. The motivation for this feature is for backup, since it makes it possible to backup the photos only once in their lifetime, and then have all the editing changes saved separately (so you don't have to burn the files to CD-ROM's ever again, for example). However, it's useful for your purposes too since you wouldn't have to save multiple copies of the graphical file anymore. (Well, the application might create additional copies if it has to, but it would manage them automatically.)

Caveats: this is a Windows application, and it's oriented towards home users, so it might not meet all of your requirements.