Installing picurl

Requirements

picurl requires the free exiv2 command line utility installed on your system. It must also be in your system path - see this Windows Tutorial for further instructions (NOTE: You must adapt the path mentioned in Step 4 to the exiv binary path, e.g. c:\Program Files\exiv2).

If your are using Linux, you should first make sure that exiv2 isn't already installed. Simply type which exiv2 in your shell window. If the system doesn't print a path, use the packaging system of your distribution to install exiv2 (e.g. rpm for Red Hat, apt for Debian/Ubuntu).

Installation on Windows

Simply grab the picurl Windows Binary from our Download page, extract the contents of the .ZIP archive and save it under your Program Files directory. picurl requires no installation and will run out-of-the box.

We strongly recommend to add picurl to your system path (see above).

Installation on Linux

To install picurl on your computer, you have to have Python 2.5 or later installed. Python 2.5 comes with "easy_install", an utility to easily install a Python Package ("Egg") onto your system, including all dependencies. To install picurl, simply run the following command in a shell window (xterm on Linux and Terminal.app on Mac OS X):

easy_install picurl

Depending on your setup, you might need to have Administrator rights to do the installation. easy_install should take care of installing dependencies. If not, please install the dependencies as listed on the Dependencies page.

Command-Line Interface

picurl doesn't (yet) have a Graphical User Interface, so you have to run it in a shell window (cmd.exe on Windows). Windows Users: It makes no sense to double-click picurl.exe - please open a shell by selecting Start - Execute. Type cmd and click OK.

The command-line interface is very easy to use, the basic structure for the commands is like this:

picurl-client [command] [param1] [param2] [...]

To see a list of commands, simply call picurl-client without any parameters, like this:

picurl-client

The client will then print out a list of commands, a description for each command and an example of how each command can be used.

Short Tutorial

We will now create an alias for a HTTP-based store and list the metadata of that store. First, create an alias with

picurl-client config myserver ftp

This tells the picurl-client to configure an alias named "myserver" using "ftp" as the protocol. Picurl will now ask you lots of questions about the store. Simply answer all questions to configure the store. Defaults will be in brackets.

Enter Server name [localhost]:    
Enter FTP Port [21]: 
Enter Username [anonymous]: 
Enter Password (MANDATORY): 
Enter Initial directory [/]: 

See if we have successfully added the alias by issuing the following command:

picurl-client list-aliases

You should see something like the following:

myserver = ftp://anonymous:mysecretpassword@localhost:21/

You can now list the directory with this command:

picurl-client list myserver

This will give you a list of URLs available on the store. You can now download all imes from the store with this command:

mkdir ./download/
picurl-client copy myserver file://./download/

That was our short tutorial on picurl. Now, feel free to explore the feature set of picurl yourself!

Known issues

No known issues reported so far