[Digikam-devel] Some things we could learn from BrilliantPhoto

[Dotan Cohen]

Back when we used a proprietary OS at home, my wife and I organized
photos in a great program called Brilliantphoto. Discussion in the
Digikam bugzilla has led to me being requested to point out some of
Brilliantphoto's features here, to help seed development of new ideas.
Here are some of our favorite features:

1) Photos can be tagged by typing in the tag's name.

2) Uncluttered interface, that has only the most common operations
visible in the main screen. (I understand that this will be addressed
in KDE 4)

3) We could zoom into and out of the photo in Vew mode. Digikam cannot
enlarge photos? I find this unusual.

4) BrillianPhoto has an excellent QuickFixes menu with these features:
Auto Color, Auto Contrast, Fill Flash (works great- I still use it by
moving pictures to a VMWare machine running windows just for this one
purpose!), Reduce Noise.

5) Photo Touch-up. This tool lets you pick a spot of similar colour to
where a blemish is, and it 'erases' the blemish. Think of removing
pimples and small stains from clothes.

6) Excellent browse by Calander feature. Digikam's is not so well
implemented as BrilliantPhoto's

7) I could edit the templates of the HTML gallery before it made the
gallery. While I'm near-certain that I could do this in Digikam, I
can't find the templates!

8) The HTML gallery included the tag information. There would even be
seperate pages for each individual tag, which would have thumbnail
images of all the photos containing that particular tag.

9) BrilliantPhoto would scan the any installed POP3 client's folders
for photos and import them. THAT was a killer feature.

10) BrilliantPhoto had an alternative system of selecting photos. Each
thumbnail and photo had a checkbox next to it, that one could check
while browsing through the photos. Then, the user could perform any
function on those particular photos (Add a tag, adjust the time, move
to Trash, etc.). There is a menu item to clear all the checkmarks.
This systme is MUCH better than holding down CTRL to select different
photos, as it allows one-handed operation and an error does not
destroy all your previous selection.

I could file wishes for each of these items, but I'd like to see some
discussion and ideas before I do that. I was recommended in Bugzilla
that the devel list is better than the regular list for this. Thanks
in advance.

Dotan Cohen

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