[KimDaBa] Re: Kimdaba ideas

[Jesper K. Pedersen]

Please direct questions/comments/ideas etc to the mailing list.

On Tuesday 13 July 2004 00:21, Robert L Krawitz wrote:
| For the past week, I've been on vacation.  Part of that has included
| being official photographer for a convention I've been attending, and
| to date I've shot 2000 images.  I'm going to have to create some DVD's
| for people from these, so I've had a lot of time to play with kimdaba.
|
| 1) Export a textual list of image files matching a given set of
|    criteria (a new entry on the File or File->Export menu).  The
|    purpose of this would be to permit building a CD-R or DVD of images
|    from a list of filenames, or many other potential uses.  This is
|    very high priority, as there is really no way to do this.
I've got no plans to do this in kimdaba. You may very easy make a plugin for 
this yourself if you want (and use KimDaBa from CVS or snapshot from today). 
As always I'm open for doing such extensions for money if it is important for 
your business, and I find it a worthy extension to KimDaBa. Ask me for an 
offer if interested.

KimDaBa in CVS includes a KIPI plugin for creating cds, btw.

| 2) Export a .kim package by means of hard links next to the images
|    rather than actual copies.  This saves space and time during the
|    export phase.  I actually implemented this; it's really quite
|    trivial.
And how would that work if you copy the resulting files to another machine? 
hmm maybe that would not be a big issue.
Please send me a patch if you already got this working.

| 3) Add an option to export to preserve the directory structure (maybe
|    this should even be the default).  What happens right now if there
|    are two files with the same name in different directories?
Files are renamed if there are duplicates. I did consider keeping the 
structure, but that doesn't really make much sense in the receiving end, does 
it, I mean what would my directory structure help you? In any case the 
receiving end can change the structure on his disk, and KimDaBa will 
recognize it and update its database.

| 4) Enable right click (context menu) in category view.  I currently
|    have almost 2000 images in one of the categories, and I'd like to
|    be able to apply an operation to all of them rather than having to
|    go through them 100 at a time (setting the images per page to 2000
|    makes the X server consume wildly excessive amounts of memory).
This is something we are looking at for KIPI. Which operations did you have in 
mind here? stuff like setting properties for a bunch of images? 

| 5) Allow selection on other criteria, such as EXIF rotation.  This
|    would permit applying a command, such as convert, in order to
|    rotate all of the rotated images, since other apps don't deal with
|    EXIF info.  This may not be the best way to do what I'm thinking
|    of...
I've considered this a number of times, it is indeed not gonna be easy to 
implement in kimdaba, so its still postponed, I believe there are more 
important issues.

| 6) I've seen a problem whereby thumbnails generated from rotated
|    images are given different names from thumbnails generated by the
|    Build Thumbnails command.  Sometimes these names include "-90",
|    while sometimes they include "270" as the rotation.  This sometimes
|    causes thumbnails to be generated multiple times.  This is a
|    problem because...
|
| 7) Thumbnail generation is very slow, a few seconds each from a 6
|    megapixel file.  This was extremely unpleasant when adding 600
|    images.
I need a more specific bug report, esp one made using "kimdaba -demo" 
thumbnail creating is much faster in currect CVS version btw.


| 8) It sometimes seems when generating thumbnails that 256 pixel
|    thumbnails are always generated in addition to the size I'm using.
|    This of course means that thumbnail generation is even slower than
|    it would be otherwise.  I usually generate thumbnails at 64, 128,
|    256, and 512 pixels to enable me to see the thumbnails at different
|    resolutions.
This is for the previews you can get using Ctrl-T - thats a feature not a bug, 
go have some coffee, after all, its only a one time thing.

| 9) Perhaps certain thumbnail sizes should be offered as standards that
|    can be selected from the menu bar rather than in the configuration
|    menu.
| 10) A tool to import images from a camera or flash card into the image
|    directory would be useful.  Currently I'm using tar to do it; I'm
|    thinking of writing an expect script to do it, too.  But this would
|    be useful in kimdaba for photographers who frequently have to add
|    lots of images to the database.
There are a plugin for this, I'm not sure how it works tho.

| Overall, kimdaba is about the only app I've found that can do anything
| like what I need for cataloguing such huge numbers of databases.

-- 
Having trouble finding a given image in your collection containing
thousands of images?

http://ktown.kde.org/kimdaba might be the answer.