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Hi all,<br>
<br>
we would like to get some feedback on a patch we have been working
on for quite some time now. It introduces a configurable "group by
filename" action to the album view which lets you automatically
combine files with matching name parts into a group.<br>
A filename based grouping feature is key for our workflow, and we
could imagine lots of use cases for other people's workflows. In
fact, we found the feature request we attached the patch to after
implementing a first version for our own purpose, so it seems there
is at least some demand for it.<br>
<br>
Find a short screencast of the current functionality here:<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://plus.google.com/107260423308980038020/posts/GgpPK27Y3fq">https://plus.google.com/107260423308980038020/posts/GgpPK27Y3fq</a><br>
<br>
As you can see, there are three configuration options:<br>
<br>
<ol>
<li>The default setting is set up to combine RAW and JPEG files.
If you have 123.nef and 123.jpg in your current selection, they
will be grouped, leaving 123.jpg on top.</li>
<li>The second option configures grouping of files featuring
common appendices added by well known image editors. If you
have, for example, some of 123.jpg, 123_v1.jpg, 123-Edit.jpg,
123_shotwell.jpg and "123 (edited).jpg" in your current
selection, they will be grouped.</li>
<li>The third option is for advanced users, giving you the option
to manually tweak the expression used for the matching. The
editable pulldown is already populated with the expressions used
to realize the two options described above as well as an example
that implements our very own grouping logic. Whatever you try
here, the previous state will always be remembered and
accessible through the pulldown. Just fool around and see what
happens.</li>
</ol>
<br>
Technically, this feature is implemented as a patch against digiKam
core. While we would have loved to implement it as a plugin, we
didn't find a way to hook a plugin into the album view and the
context menu. The flexible matching part is based on the popular
regular expression syntax. Gilles, we know you are not a fan of
regular expressions, but we couldn't think of another way to achieve
a flexible matcher like this without overcomplicating things. We
just hope that if you would totally hate regular expressions you
would have closed the feature request #318357 before someone
accepted the challenge to work on it. Of course, the offer I made in
my comment to the G+ post above still holds.<br>
<br>
While we consider the patch ready for prime time now, we would like
to hear:<br>
<br>
<ol>
<li>Is the UI intuitive enough, especially from a KDE point of
view?</li>
<li>Could you think of other predefined grouping options than the
two introduced above? Of course we would like to serve most
users with easy defaults, leaving the manual expression editing
to power users.</li>
<li>Would it be realistic to get the feature into digiKam in the
near future?</li>
</ol>
<br>
Best regards, Ulf
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