[Digikam-devel] [Bug 196672] New: Allow global preference for default album dating

[Michael Liddle]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196672

           Summary: Allow global preference for default album dating
           Product: digikam
           Version: 0.10.0
          Platform: unspecified
        OS/Version: Linux
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: NOR
         Component: general
        AssignedTo: digikam-devel at kde.org
        ReportedBy: michael at liddle.net.nz


Version:           0.10.0 (using 4.2.90 (KDE 4.2.90 (KDE 4.3 Beta2)) "release
138", KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop / openSUSE_11.0)
Compiler:          gcc
OS:                Linux (i686) release 2.6.25.20-0.4-default

This might be better considered as a wish than a bug, but I feel that it has
buggy consequences... see background.

First some background:
---------------------

I had some photos in three different albums, which I'll label A, B, and C,
where the photos in A were created before those in B, which were before those
in C. All three of these albums were imported into digikam together, but
despite having "View -> Sort images -> By date" selected, search results sorted
the albums in the order C, A, B. Hmmm, confusing... I spent a long time trying
to work out how my image dates were so messed up, despite looking OK. Turned
out that this corresponded to the modification dates on the corresponding
folders, and these dates were used to set the "Album dates" which appear to
have a higher priority than the individual image dates in the sorting
algorithm. Changing the "Sort albums" option did not fix this. None of this is
what I'd expected.

A suggestion for fixing this problem (with a bit of speculation on my part
about the internals of digikam):
---------------------------------------------------

Album dates seem to be initialised to the modification date of their directory
(correct?). Then one must manually set the date to something otherwise (oldest,
average, newest, etc...). I think it would be much simpler (and less onerous)
on the user if there could be a global preference for deriving the default
album date (e.g. oldest, newest, average, or folder date); especially for
importing large back-catalogues of photos into digikam. 

Moreover, rather than simply being able to initialise album dates in a
preferred way, it would be nice if an albums date could be set to "static" _or_
"dynamic" (maybe requiring a default option also). A static date would be set
and never change on its own. You could still include oldest, newest, etc...
shortcuts for picking these one-off dates. A dynamic date would change as
changes to the folder's contents are noticed, based on whether oldest, newest,
etc... is set in the albums properties.

Finally I should note that I only propose the keeping of static dates at all
because that seems to be the existing bahaviour. I could well imagine doing
away with it completely however, and just using dynamic.

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