[Digikam-devel] Integration of libkmap in digiKam 2.0

[Michael G. Hansen]

On 07/13/2010 01:09 PM, Gilles Caulier wrote:
>>> Your new map mode in the middle view will not be redondant with
>>> geolocation tab from right sidebar. I'm a little bit confused there.
>>>
>> Well, using the map in center has some advantages: first of all, it shows
>> all the photos from a selected album directly on the map (in the right tab,
>> are displayed only selected photos). In future, maybe we can extend the
>> libkmap code to show the selected photos al large thumbnails and the
>> unselected photos as small thumbnails. Also, the user will have the
>> possibility to close the right and left side-bar and have more space to
>> observe his photos and make operations directly on the map (specially
>> netbook users, because they already have little display space).
>>
>> About removing the geolocation tool from left/right sidebar, this is your
>> call, I really don't know what to say about this.
>
> I'm talking about to remove only the right sidebar tab, not the left
> which is deleagte to perform map search.
>
> I'm waiting Michael viewpoint there.

In my opinion, all three possible map views are useful ;-)

Let's start with the one in the center, which does not yet exist, and 
which Marcel first mentioned at the coding sprint in November. It is 
useful, as Gabriel pointed out, because it provides the most space to 
show a map and can be used in fullscreen. It is generally useful, when 
you have a bunch of images that are in some way related by an operation 
in the left sidebar, like album, timeline or tags, and you want to just 
see those images on a map. Libkmap was designed to handle Qt models with 
one extra helper class which retrieves thumbnails and coordinates for 
model indices, and since the icon view is model view based, adding a 
libkmap view to it should be easy. That's why I suggested Gabriel to 
start with this, because he can use the time to get used to the digikam 
code base without having to develop anything fancy inside of libkmap. 
Here we still have to think about how we handle images without 
coordinates and whether we display both an icon view and a map with a 
splitter in between, kind of like in the gpssync, but with the digikam 
style icon view instead of the list view.

The map view in the properties panel is useful when you are viewing some 
images in an album, and want to see where a few images were taken. An 
additional feature that was often requested is geotagging by drag and 
drop from the icon view to this sidebar, and libkmap can, by 
implementing a drag and drop helper, accept drops onto the map. However, 
as far as I can remember, the current map view in the right sidebar does 
not have a model yet. For a first try, one could use the selection model 
as the model, and request the coordinates from the album model via the 
model helper. Once we wish to implement things like drag-and-drop, we 
may need to use a proper model here, but I'm not sure yet.

The map search on the left currently only displays thumbnails for images 
in the current search rectangle, as the request to the database is only 
done once a selection has been made. In order to be able to display 
images from the entire database without making a selection first, the 
grouping code of libkmap can be changed so that instead of grouping 
images from the model, to instead request the number of pictures from 
the database that are in a certain area. This way, for large numbers of 
images, we don't have to implement a proper model, and then query all 
items for their coordinates. We will also have to find a good way to 
make selection rectangles, as I am not sure yet how to properly make 
selections in the google maps backend, since it is based on KHTML.

Michael