[Digikam-devel] digikam and search ioslave (fwd)

[Renchi Raju]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 00:46:54 +0200
From: Xavier Helluy <xavier.helluy at web.de>
To: RenchiRaju <rraju at uiuc.edu>
Subject: Re: [Digikam-devel] digikam and search ioslave


Renchi Raju <rraju at uiuc.edu> schrieb am 10.06.05 23:39:26:
>
>> I read some time ago that you were implementing search inside digikam.
>> I wonder if one could not make use of my ioslave to allow searching from
>> digikam and outside of digikam.
>
> digikamsearch ioslave has already been implemented. In addition on the
> frontend side, a quick search dialog is ready and advanced search dialog is
> being implemented.
>
> http://pooh.tam.uiuc.edu/digikam/digikamsearch-01.mpeg

very nice. I didn't know that all of this had been implemented already. That is great news.
Out of curiosity, how is the search working ? Do you build an inverted-index or something like that ?
I will look at the code. Digikam is such a great app :-D.
>
>> A while back I indexed via the digikamtags
>> ioslave my digikam image albums. I could search on on tag names and
>> metadata. But this was difficult because of the way the digikamtags ioslave
>> names its path and it is impossible to know when a tag has changed or not.
>> I finally removed the code, (which got broken for other reasons). So
>> indexed data can get out of sync really fast So if digikam would be
>> responsible for indexing its albums, or would notify the world when new
>> tags are created/added, this would be great.
>
> the db backend for digikam was changed recently and all the albums and photos
> are indexed currently. how often do you index the data?  it might be possible
> for you to watch the digikam3.db [poll, directory watch, or other option] and
> get updated tags, albums.

In a perfect world, one would index the data when they are changed. A file watch on digikam3.db would do the job in  this case to know that something changed.
But how can I know which tags changed, or this kind of specific information ?

>> I think trying to output the searchable-data-information, while having
>> application-specific search-dialogs would be nice for kde too. One could
>> then even imaging that one could switch betwen different kde search-dialog
>> according to what one is looking for (like a general multifield dialog, a
>> image specialized dialog,...). Ok I am being confusing now
>
> I'm not quite sure the level of collaboration you are expecting. We are a
> specialized app and have specialized needs :).

I was thinking a bit at something like the google search. I have not mature the idea at all, but google  has a  web-search and a image-search webpage
So I could imagine a "general"-search dialog and a more specialized image-search dialog for kde which could be called from any open-file dialog.
My search dialog is not Boolean aware yet, so maybe I would like to use the digikam coming boolean search dialog too as an advanced multifield search dialog ;-) ?
But I admit I have not really let those ideas mature yet.

And yes you are specialized, (but almost a standard for kde I would say ;-) ) , but searching images is quite a common desktop-task.
And it would be nice to see  image-search implemented and unified on the desktop. In other words, wouldn't it be nice to be able to use digikam fast or advance search dialogs from kolourpaint, or kpresenter,...  With ioslaves, this is possible.

>In addition, there is the
> tenor project also coming about.

Yes, I know... You mean, I should wait until there to be notifyed on digikamtags changes :-(

And tenor does not address any user-friendly GUI problem or the image-search on whole kde.
What is perhaps missing too is a kind of standard API for search dialogs.

>But that should not stop us from sharing
> ideas.

thanks. I am a bit tired, it is over midnight here in Europe. But I would really like to be able to index digikamtags, and I would really like to help make search on KDE be more fun.
I hope I am not getting annoying

happy day/night

xavier




>
> renchi

-- 
XH  
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