Adium - Xtras - View Xtra: Contact Album

	Contact Album
	Submitted By Jürgen Kreileder (jkreileder)

Description

This plugin stores all icons that your contacts use over time and comes with a viewer for the icons.

After installation, the album will slowly fill with icons as your contacts change them.
You can open the album viewer with the Contact Album entry in the Window menu and with the View Album entry in the context menu for contacts.
Icons can be copied from the album viewer via Drag&Drop.

Currently the plug-in comes with English, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish localizations. Further translations are welcome.

The version of the plug-in available here requires Mac OS X 10.6 or later and an Intel-Mac.
An older version which only requires Mac OS X 10.5 and works on PPC-Macs too, is still available from my site: Contact Album 1.0.9

For more info and source code, visit my website.

Changes

1.2.0:
Update UI to look more Lion-ish and resemble the Chat Transcript Viewer from Adium 1.5 more closely.

1.1.1:
Properly update the image view when a list entry vanishes through deletion of images.

1.1.0:
Add support for 64-bit Intel builds of Adium (that is, Adium 1.5 compatibility).
Drop PPC and Adium 1.3 support.

1.0.9:
Added Italian translation. Thanks to Bruno Pierini!

1.0.8:
Added Polish translation. Thanks to Dariusz Jażdżyk!
Note that a few strings will still show up in English. For these strings the translation should get inherited from the main Adium bundle (the Chat Transcript Viewer in particular), unfortunately some of them are missing for Polish.

1.0.7:
Added Spanish translation. Thanks to Ignacio Robles!

1.0.6:
Now for real... Make sure menu items show up in the right place both with Adium 1.3 and Adium 1.4

1.0.5:
Make sure menu items show up in the right place both with Adium 1.3 and Adium 1.4

1.0.4:
Added Swedish translation. Many thanks to Valter Kraemer!

1.0.3:
Adapted to recent API changes on trunk.

1.0.2:
Added Finnish translation. Thanks to Iiro again.

1.0.1:
Speed up the initial populating of the album. Thanks to Iiro for testing!

Images

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Comments

You can reply to individual comments by clicking the "Reply" link next to each.

# by Iiro on 01/23/09 at 14:10:03

Excellent, five ducks!

One question though, on the initial install it didn't add my contacts' icons until I opened the chat window with them.
Do I have to do this everytime or does it automatically update the icon, for example when someone logs in?

# by jkreileder on 01/24/09 at 00:47:29

Thanks!

The plugin relies on Adium sending icon-changed notifications. Adium actually sends too many of those since the plugin is only interested in real server-side icon changes.
Getting the first icon for a contact is a special case. Early in development I tried to fetch all icons as soon as an account went online but testing showed that Adium did send notifications for all contacts on the account anyway, so I removed that code. I've tested this with MSN and GTalk, it might be different for other protocols or larger contact lists than I have. May I ask what you use?

# by Iiro on 01/24/09 at 10:17:44

I'm using both Live (62 contacts) and AIM (74 contacts).
So far I'm only seeing the images for 64 contacts, which is the number I've opened the chat window with.

# by jkreileder on 01/25/09 at 23:19:11

Please send me an email (jk@blackdown.de). I'll send you a build which tries to fetch all known icons when an account gets connected. I wonder if it speeds up the initial filling of the album.

# by Anarco on 01/23/09 at 15:07:41

Really Excellent ! :-)

# by xd21 on 01/24/09 at 21:31:13

i can't understand yet where do you go to open the window of the contact album

# by jkreileder on 01/24/09 at 22:58:13

Look in the "Window" menu, it's right between "Chat Transcript Viewer" and "File Transfers".
Alternatively, right-click on a contact, "View Album" is right under "View Chat Transcripts" in that menu.

# by xd21 on 01/24/09 at 23:58:36

i know it :P i just have to relaunch the adium ;) thanks btw

# by Félix on 02/01/09 at 04:27:49

That's pretty damn neat.

# by xSpikex on 02/07/09 at 11:47:24

well done!

# by kjg on 02/09/09 at 20:13:50

Just FYI, This plug-in causes problems with current Adium Trunk builds. It works just fine on 1.3.3rc1 though. It might have to do with http://trac.adiumx.com/changeset/25886.

# by jkreileder on 02/09/09 at 20:18:04

Thanks for letting me know! I've tested it with the 1.3.3 betas and rc1 but not with recent builds from trunk. I'll upload an update in the next days.

# by kjg on 02/12/09 at 15:50:11

Thanks for the quick update!

# by kjg on 02/12/09 at 15:56:40

It would be nice if Contact Album would aggregate the images across accounts. For example I have multiple AIM accounts and I have the same contact in both accounts. That contact's aim image shows up twice in Contact Album -- once for each account.

# by jkreileder on 02/12/09 at 18:43:55

Actually the plugin already does this!

Unless you found a bug, of course. The key is [contact's service]+[contacts' uid]+[sha1sum of image], your own accounts don't play a role in this. The icons do get stored multiple times if you have the same contact on multiple accounts but only one gets displayed (with the most recent time-stamp).
(Deleting an icon deletes all duplicates too, btw)

Please check whether the icons are really the same. E.g. by opening them in Preview by double-clicking on them and comparing the file names. If the file names (which are just the sha1 sums) are different, the icons just look similar but are different. If the file names are the same, I'll need a bit more information.

# by kjg on 02/12/09 at 19:14:03

Oh, you're right. The duplicates are due to one image being a jpg and one being a gif. I wonder why that happened.

# by jkreileder on 02/12/09 at 19:22:32

I've seen that too. I have no idea what causes it, it comes like that from the purple layer and probably from the server.

# by RW1981 on 02/26/09 at 15:45:22

Has anyone ran into an issue where the stored icons initially reads the actual name of the contact, but then when Adium is restarted the name is changed to some sort of reference number?

# by jkreileder on 02/26/09 at 18:15:56

Yes, it's known issue. There actually two problems after starting Adium:
1. Contacts won't be identified nicely unless you connect the respective account
2. The Facebook module is even worse: it won't show proper names until your contacts come online

Other Adium components have the same issue you see, e.g. the Chat Transcript Viewer. There's not much I can do about this from my plugin, it's a problem in the way Adium identifies contacts. I'd rather fix the problem in Adium before doing an ugly work-around in this plugin.

# by flr on 03/05/09 at 22:26:13

Hello, I am in 10.4.11 and was VERY disapointed that the plugin requires 10.5.

You miss a large part of adium users with such a limitation. Why ?

I like mac but it is a frequent problem with mac software that tehy need the latest version of the OS. It is difficultly understandable. I very rarely have this problem in win32 environments.

So Please... (!) could you make the effort to support a few recent releases of MAc OS X ???

Thanks a lot.

# by jkreileder on 03/05/09 at 22:45:04

I understand that are you disappointed about it. The limitation to Leopard comes from the original aim of the plugin. I started working on this to get a bit into OS X programming (being a UNIX/Linux/Java guy normally), when it came to implementing the viewer part I had to decide whether to write it from scratch or to use the existing infrastructure. I chose the latter, namely IKImageBrowserView.
If I find the time I'll look into writing a viewer component that works on Tiger too.

# by flr on 03/10/09 at 19:15:12

Thanks for your understanding. I know time is precious. So many thanks in advance.

# by altf4 on 03/06/09 at 02:12:18

simply awesome tool ..
this is exactly what i did search for for Years ..

# by altf4 on 03/06/09 at 02:33:16

just one REALLY annoying issue are the symlinks for the current image ...
this causes on every sync of the idisk houndreds of sync errors ... as idisk not support symlinks ..

any way to bypass that ?

# by jkreileder on 03/06/09 at 21:37:46

Good point, I didn't really expect anybody to use it on a filesystem that doesn't support symbolic links. I'll use another method in the next version.

# by altf4 on 03/11/09 at 01:18:00

for all having the same isuue ... here is a workarround ..

find ~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Users/Default/Contact Album/ -name ".current" -exec rm '{}' ;

just execute this before syncing ... no errors occour and the next sync is just as fast as before .. as the syncagent does not recheck all album-directorys every time.

# by altf4 on 03/11/09 at 01:19:09

find ~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Users/Default/Contact Album/ -name ".current" -exec rm '{}' ;
(working version) ;-)

# by jkreileder on 03/11/09 at 01:23:52

not really, the backslashes before the spaces still don't show up :D
(the only purpose of the symlinks is to keep timestamps more sane. it's safe to delete them.)

# by altf4 on 03/18/09 at 08:15:02

yeah .. well i cant delete the 2nd comment ;-)
well everyone knows that i guess ;-)

however .. there is another issue with albums and the iDisk ... it seems like they getting almost always fully synced wel lat least the current ones i guess.

if adium runns about 5 minutes ... (about 50 user online)
arround 200 files getting synced. (well this is allright so far .... is more information) ;-)

i really love this tool ..... kind of upset why i did not found it more earlier ;-)

# by drosseros on 06/29/09 at 19:32:37

It is perfect ;)

But i have an opinion. Is it possible to see also 'my profile pictures' in contact album? and choosing a 'personal photo' in contact album?

# by jkreileder on 06/29/09 at 23:48:26

Thanks!

You mean like an extended version of the "Recent Pictures" feature Adium already provides?
(You, kind of, can do that already by adding yourself as a contact. Works at least for some services, MSN for example.)

# by drosseros on 06/29/09 at 20:02:47

for example rigth click on photo and click 'make personal photo'.

# by jkreileder on 06/29/09 at 23:44:49

Yea, I already thought about this. I'll add it for the next version.

# by drosseros on 07/01/09 at 12:13:14

Thanks! Good news for me ;) I'm waiting the 'the next version'.

By the way, if it's not too hard, i may try to translate it to Turkish. mail: drosseros@gmail.com

# by wiretalker on 08/26/09 at 03:24:27

very cool i use this to tell who logged in today. easier than looking at a long contact list.

# by Bhikha on 09/02/09 at 02:31:29

I was looking for this for a long time now :)

# by fama on 03/23/10 at 09:13:18

what an amazing plugin :)

would you please upgrade/make it working with Adium v1.5hgr3161 ?

many thanks for the great work !

# by adiama on 01/29/11 at 22:00:26

This looks like an amazing plugin, something that I would really love to have! It installed fine and didn't crash Aduim on restart, but it didn't show any icons of my friends/connections. I guess it's because I'm on OS X 10.6... Is there a chance for an upgrade at some point?

# by jkreileder on 01/30/11 at 04:07:19

It should work fine on 10.6. (10.5 is just the minimum requirement for the plugin.)
What services are you using?

# by adiama on 02/02/11 at 05:55:46

I don't know what I did, maybe restarted Adium a few times, maybe just got more contacts signing in and out but the album now shows some of my friends' pics, not only mine. This is awesome, thanks for a great plugin!

# by [Tee]derDoc[DMC] on 09/05/11 at 22:23:08

You know, maybe it would be a good addition to be able to assign custom names and group arbitrary contacts in the album.
I have, prob. like a lot of people, multiple accounts across a dozen chat networks, and numerous double buddies on each, in other words the same buddy on numerous different accounts/networks.
Since the introduction of proxy contact-list entries in Adium, I have given up on trying to combine them into a single contact-list entry since this single contact now shows up in multiple groups in the contact list, since those tend to appear and disappear on a whim. Notable are groups for specific networks like skype. And even better, a grouped account now shows up in the skype group even if skype is not connected, in other words the skype group is still there, only because one of the multiple accounts of that person is connected. Total nightmare!
The whole point of grouping a contact was to reduce space in the contact list, and not have them occupy space in 5 different groups.
Anyway, since contact list albums seems to take its grouping hints from the contact list, that does not work very well for me anymore..
I would like to be able to do that only in contact list album, and also give a name for contacts to be used when only the ID is available, independent of Adium itself, like you mentioned facebook which only knows nicknames when that spec. buddy is actually connected.
Or does it cache the names? Actually I think it does... well.. still I have 200 people in FB that rarely connect so now I have around 100 FB-IDs in my contact list album, which would be nice to name until they actually connect...

Ohh and another thing.. It would be cool, if you could sort, and by that I mean group, the left pane of CLA by either name alphabetically, or by network, so all facebook contacts are grouped, and maybe you can think of some more useful grouping ways...
-V

# by Myrandor on 11/04/11 at 15:22:34

I'm not able to install the latest plugin (1.1.1) with Adium 1.5b2, and when I try to "download" it, I get this error:
An error occurred: Only the submitter, mods and admins are allowed to download Xtras before they are approved.

Any way to download the compiled version outside of Adium Xtras' website?

# by jkreileder on 11/04/11 at 15:29:24

One of the admins has to approve the new version. Usually this takes only a few hours but this time the delay seems to be a bit longer.

# by Myrandor on 11/04/11 at 15:31:47

I got the same issue with version 1.1.0 yesterday. I tried to build the source, but I had a hard time since I never build anything with XCode before. ;)

Hope they will approve it soon!

# by jkreileder on 11/04/11 at 16:04:02

Yea, I uploaded 1.1.1 before anyone had approved 1.1.0. If it goes on like this, I'll have 1.2.0 (with some visual updates) ready before 1.1.1 is approved.
For the time being, 1.1.1 is also available here: https://blog.blackdown.de/static/osx/a...m-1.1.1.zip

As for building from source:
* Check out Adium trunk
* Build it from the command-line with make
* Set the environment variable ADIUM to the path to your built Adium tree, e.g: "export ADIUM=/Users/jk/devel/adium"
* Build my plug-in with make

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Install | Download
84.9kb (47445 downloads)

4.40 / 439 votes

Current Version:	1.2.0
Last Updated:	11/05/11