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<p>Hi all,</p>
<p>I am using Digikam to manage about 20 years of photos, ~250GB
altogether. Until 2015, iPhoto was my main photo managing app, but
this has changed when Apple moved to Photos which was too
restrictive (in the beginning) for me. So I ported my whole
library to Digikam. And most of my daily workflow has become
better, especially the performance and stability (certain
pre-releases excluded ;-) ).</p>
<p>But one thing I am REALLY sorely <b>missing</b> is the ability
to <b>not just create, but EDIT and MANAGE sets of images for
printing</b>.<br>
There is the "Print Creator" but it's a one way street: you can
select images and feed it to the print creator, change the order
and the layout, but you can't SAVE this configuration, clone and
modify it slightly, and reload it later.<br>
Also, <b>custom layouts</b> and layout exceptions (e.g. use space
for two images for a panoramic photo) are not possible.<br>
</p>
<p>iPhoto had this feature set almost done in perfection:<br>
The normal photo organization was in "Events" (this is "Albums" in
Digikam and folders on the disk).<br>
But when you create an "Album" in iPhoto (let's call it a
"Project" here, to avoid confusion) it was different:</p>
<ul>
<li>At first sight it looked like a normal album. But -<br>
</li>
<li>It had no physical content. It had just links to existing
photos.</li>
<li>It had its own internal <b>sort</b><b> order,</b> <b>grouping</b>
definition and additional internal photo <b>descriptions.</b></li>
<li><b>Editing</b><b></b> <b>photos</b> in such a Project (for
printing) would only be valid <b>inside this project</b>.</li>
<li>The Project included a selected <b>print or display template</b>
which would arrange the photos on a print sheet, inside a
calendar, or whatever.</li>
</ul>
<p>The templates were readily layouted single- or multipage
documents (e.g. calendars) which had placeholders for photos,
which allowed you to zoom, pan, rotate and crop the images. After
filling in all placeholers, the template could be printed. Not all
images inside a Project needed to be included in the finished
template. Some templates had options for one large or multiple
smaller photos on a page.<br>
</p>
<p>Depending on the template, this would allow us to make <b>using</b>
our images much more comfortable. And I think Digikam already
contains much of the technology required for this feature set. We
just need to add some UI interactions.</p>
<p>What do you think? Should we add this new dimension to Digikam?<br>
I think this could open up a whole new world of export and design
templates and more active use for your photos.<br>
Especially non-technical users could contribute these templates
(maybe we can even use some format that's easily editable by
non-techies).<br>
</p>
<p>if this sounds like something Digikam should be able to do, I can
write a draft specification of what I think needs to be done.<br>
</p>
<p>Thoughts?</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Regards, Jens</pre>
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