[Digikam-devel] [Bug 297804] Saving an image loses portait orientation

[Matti Rintala]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=297804

--- Comment #10 from Matti Rintala <bitti at cs.tut.fi> ---
Marcel,

I understand that you don't want digikam to alter image orientation if it has
been changed by the user. However, I find it questionable if digikam does not
update its own metadata if metadata of the image changes (and user has NOT
overridden orientation in digikam). This causes conflicting metadata which can
only confuse users (like me).

The main reason I'm currently using digikam is the fact that it does not force
me to do all my workflow in digikam. I'm free to edit my pictures using
different software and use digikam only for organization and metadata
management. That's why i'm not using Lightroom, for example.

About updating orientation if width/height is changed: I'm against all sort of
heuristics to solve these problem, since there are always corner cases which
work wrong or unintuitively (consider a square image where width=height, where
change would not be detected by your heuristics, if original image is rotated).

What about the following solutions to the problem?

1) Digikam remembers whether orientation has been manually changed in digikam.
If yes, changes in file's orientation metadata do not affect digikam, otherwise
orientation is updated if it changes in the file

2) If orientation is changed in digikam, digikam remembers both the new
orientation and the original one. If orientation in the file is changed,
digikam can detect this and update its own orientation. As long as orientation
in the file is the same as the original, digikam does not update its own
orientation data.

I think 1) could even be implemented without affecting digikam's current
database schema. Orientation is now coded as one integer in digikam4.db. You
could use an extra bit (or the sign of the number) to flag that orientation has
been changed by the user. Then of course routines reading that information
would have to be changed so that the flag is stripped away when using the
actual orientation.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.