[KPhotoAlbum] Copying data & grouping files

[Ted Miller]

I have been using KPhotoAlbum for a few months now, but I am new to the 
mailing list.  I have a few simple questions.

1. I have my photos on a RAID5 array on a server in my basement.  Can I 
access the kphotoalbum index from both my Centos machine (running 
kphotoalbum version 3.0) and my Fedora9 machine (running 3.1.1)?  My main 
machine is the Centos one, so that is where I will probably look for photos 
to actually USE them (put them into something else).  However I find it 
useful to have the Fedora9 machine for using some of the programs I can't 
find .rpms for, or for programs where I want a later version.

2. I thought I read a comment somewhere that said I could copy the tags, 
date, etc from one photo to another, but I can't figure out how to do that. 
  Is this possible?  If not, could it be added?  It would make life easier 
until the parent/child/group/derivative functionality that Paul has been 
playing with makes it into a production version.

3. What plug-ins do you folks find particularly useful?  FYI, I shoot a lot 
of raw/jpeg, do most of my photo editing in Cinepaint (Gimp when starting 
with 8 bit material), use UFRaw, and have a partially calibrated work 
environment (monitor is calibrated, Epson R1900 printer is close, working 
on scanner and HP DJ712C).

4. What plug-ins should I probably disable (duplicates, useless, buggy, etc).

5. If I set up my photo storage using .xmp files, is there a way that I can 
get KPhotoAlbum to read the original picture date from the .xmp file and 
ignore whatever the editing program put into the .jpg or .tif or .png file?

6. What formats have the capability to embed info (that can be read by 
KPA?).  I usually create a .tif or .png from my raw files, because I 
usually edit them in some other program before I am ready to print them.  I 
hate having to go back and correct the date/time on each individual file 
(that is why I asked about copying data in #2 above).  If one uncompressed 
format carries the original date/time and another doesn't, I will use the 
one that does for my "un-rawed" files.

Thanks for any question you can answer.

Ted in Indiana