[Digikam-devel] [Bug 146760] Providing a Timeline-View for quickly narrowing donw the date of photos

[chiefaua]

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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146760         




------- Additional Comments From tom_t gmx at  2007-12-13 19:42 -------
Hello

Concerning the new timeline widget, I would have some ideas/whishes. I attach 
a screenshot from Photoshop Elements, where I got the original idea from 
(from my old windows-times...).

So, my whishes/ideas are:

- It would be cool if the timeline-widget could be visible all the time, maybe 
on top or bottom of the screen (maybe even movable like a toolbar or 
dock-widget which only docks on top or bottom)

- IMHO, the timeline widget should not only be displayed in the dates sidebar 
view, as the user has there a feedback about time/dates anyway. It would be 
much more usefull, if the timeline widget only displays a statistic about the 
items currently displayed in the main window.

- The timeline widged should provide some visual feedback about the currently 
selected item/items. So if a item from 12th march 2007 is selected, march 
2007 should be highlighted in some form.

- If you click on some point of the timeline widget, the main view should 
automatically jump to the first photo of this date.

- The timeline widged should act as a filter (maybe like the new filter in the 
status line...). You could have handles at the right and left side of the 
widget, and drag them towards the centre to define lower and upper bound of 
the desired date range to display. Maybe we could "gray out" the not-visible 
date range in this case, to inform the user, that there are other items, 
which are just filtered away in the moment.

Let me just explain some use-cases which would be possible which such a 
timeline widget:
suppose, you have assigned tags for all photos of your children. Now you could 
search for these items in the tag-view sidebar or by clicking on the 
corresponding checkboxes.
The timeline widget could give you now direct feedback about when you have 
made photos of your children, and how many.
As you browse through your photos, you always see visually how old these 
photos are.
You can filter the displayed photos very quickly by just dragging the upper 
and lower bounds of the timeline view to the values you are interested in.

I know, all this would be possible too by defining customs searches, but this 
does not give you the immediate visual feedback, and very often I am just 
browsing my photos, and not interested in defining a lot of searches just for 
one-time use.
I am also aware of the fact, that there exists already a filter for tags, and 
that I could filter within the virtual date albums using tag filters. But 
this approach does also not provide visual feedback (altough this would 
change with the new feature of displaying the item count and the timeline 
widget in the date-view sidebar, but I am not sure if the displayed count 
would refer to the visible count or the count in the database)

The task described above can also not be done easily with virtual albums, as I 
can only select one of these (either date or tags).

So, finally I think that the timeline-widget I am thinking of would be quite 
usefull for browsing or rediscovering photos, not really for searching photos 
of which I already know when I took them.


Additionally, I would have another idea/whish for the timeline-widget:

- The timeline widget should choose automatically the right granuality of the 
scale (decade, year, quarter, month, week, day), depending on the "youngest" 
and "oldest" item in the current view, and the space it has on the screen. 
Optionally the user could change this, which would imply that we would need 
some sort of scrolling mechanism to reach the (then) invisible portions of 
the date-range.


I hope I could point out my vision quite clearly. I know, that some/many of 
these ideas/whishes are quite hard to implement or would cause performance 
issues, but I just wanted to precise my ideas.
I will certainly not stop digiKam if my whishes can not be realized, but I 
still think that it would be a cool feature.


Best regards

Thomas