[Digikam-devel] gpssearch improvment

[Gabriel Voicu]

Hi everyone,

As you may have seen, I've start changing gpssearch from the oldversion
using marble to the new version using libkmap. Now, me and Michael have came
with some ideas about how this should look, but if you think that we should
change something, please let us know. I will copy/paste fragments from an
e-mail from Michael because he explained very well the options and comment
on them.

" We have to think about how the user actually performs a search. In the
current implementation, he has to control+left-click to start a search
rectangle. With the thumbnails shown even before a search is started, I see
two ways:

1a) Still using some sort of selection rectangle. Since we can probably not
handle the control modifier on mouse clicks in the Google Maps backend, we
could instead introduce 'mouse modes'. By this, I mean buttons which change
what the mouse does. In the old search there are already mouse modes like
'Pan', 'Select', 'Filter' and 'Zoom'. We could make a 'Start search
rectangle' mouse mode, where the user clicks a button, then clicks on the
map, and a rectangle appears as he drags the mouse. This should be doable in
both Marble and Google Maps.

1b) Obviously, users will try clicking on thumbnails. They would probably
expect to then see the images belonging to the thumbnail in the album. There
are two issues with this:

1b1) Currently, the map search albums are rectangular lat/lon areas. The
grouped images, however, are not rectangular areas in some cases, because if
there are some images left between two groups, they are given to one of the
adjacent groups. So if a user clicks on a thumbnail indicating 100 images,
depending on how we define the rectangle, he may get more or less images.

1b2) If a user has clicked on one image, then clicks on another, do we only
show images belonging to the new click? Or do we add some sort of way to do
'control+click' to add to the existing selection? To handle this, we will
need multiple search areas at once and will have to extend the map search
album code."

Taking in consideration his good analysis, I've thought that it should be
better to keep the rectangle selection because it's more precise than the
group selection. Another positive thing about rectangle selection would be
the the small amount of actions to select photos(2 clicks and some mouse
movement vs (number of groups) * clicks). Is this OK for you?

Another thing would be:

"2) Now let's say a user has made a selection, either using a rectangle or
by clicking on a thumbnail. We then create a map search album from the
coordinates. What should happen on the map? Do we hide all other markers
outside of the selection? Or do we just gray them out?

3) Interaction with the images in the search range: Currently, you can
easily filter the album view by clicking on a thumbnail. I find this quite
useful, because you can quickly refine a search to have a look at some
images, without having to do a new selection. So I would like to keep this
possibility. Another thing we offer is selecting images on the map, and
making this selection correspond to the selection in the album view. Not
sure how much this is actually used.

4) If we hide the images outside the search range, we can make the points
noted in 5) easier by removing the database based marker tiler from the
kmap, and instead showing the images from the model displayed in the album
view. If we get access to a selection model, many things are already solved.
We then only have to implement filtering."

I find hiding the selected markers/thumbnails outside selection the best and
easy way to do it, as Michael said. It would be more faster(less
transactions to database) and it's more intuitive for the user. Also, please
let me know if you are OK with this.

Best Regards,

Gabriel Voicu
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