[Digikam-devel] First proposal for IPTC interface

[Gerhard Kulzer]

I am in favour of storing the metadata both in the images themselves and in 
the database (my current db is 1.1MB for about 10k photos, all tagged). Thus 
filtering and searching will still be fast through db access, you don't need 
to read all images every time you start digiKam which would be slow. Then 
every time time one opens an image its data could be read and synced to db.

The disadvantage of storing data in the images is certainly when taggin many 
shots at a time, all the files have to be opened and rewritten. With png 
format in high compression this could also lead to long sessions.

Concerning the country code I'd provide a fixed list to force unambiguous 
tagging. 

I use digiKam in my company, and there I profit from the database which i 
access from other applications, for example our document archive program. It 
is wonderful to have the db available data without the need to open the 
digiKam itself. This is another argument to have metadata in both images and 
db.

Thanks for your work, Heiner
Gerhard

Am Sonntag, 24. Juli 2005 14.27 schrieb Heiner Lamprecht:
> Hi everybody,
>
> as already mentioned, I'm working on an integration of the IPTC
> datafields in digikam.
>
> You can find two screenshots proposing a new "Image Comments/Tags"
> dialog displaying both the tags and the IPTC fields:
>
> http://www.heiner-lamprecht.net/digikam_new_01.png
> http://www.heiner-lamprecht.net/digikam_new_02.png
>
> I would like to get your feedback and discuss some more question on
> the integration.  So far, I only used a few fields defined in the
> IPTC standard.  For a complete list of tags supported by exiv2, see
> http://home.arcor.de/ahuggel/exiv2/iptc.html
>
> Some of the fields, like e.g. the country code (and as a result the
> country name), normally have predefined contents.  Shall we
> therefore offer a readonly list to select instead of allowing free
> text?
>
> When using IPTC, IMHO all metadata on the images shall be stored in
> the image file itself, meaning that the db-file we use now will
> only act as an index but not the primary source of information.  In
> that case we need to find a way to handle hierarchical tags as IPTC
> doesn't support the directly.
>
> In the current version, one can enter a comment, which is for me
> more or less the same as the IPTC "summary".  But nevertheless, it
> is a different datafield, because it is stored as the EXIF-comment,
> which is also supported by several other applications.  Shall we
> merge them automatically or shall the user be able to add them
> differently?
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
>     Heiner

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