[Digikam-devel] Re: Versioning, but not editing in digiKam

[Marcel Wiesweg]

Please note that we have built the infrastructure, and a basic feature set, 
but not everything is already implemented as it could be. The important part 
is that implementing such features is then only a matter of putting pieces 
together.

> 1. Most cameras are now able to create both RAW and JPEG files at the
> same time. I think digikam should be able to recognize that each
> RAW/JPEG pair is really just two versions of the same picture. Maybe it
> could happen while importing from camera, but there should also be an
> option to do automatic "version pairing" on existing folders. I have
> thousands of these images.

It is not implement, but considered ;-)
Yes, this is one of the most obvious features we need.

> 
> 2. When I apply some keywords/tags/metadata, I want to apply them to all
> versions at the same time. That could be descriptions or keywords,
> author, copyright, etc. But sometimes I want to apply metadata or tags
> to only one specific version. Both should be possible.

Should that be decided by setup option, or do you have some UI suggestions for 
this differentiation?

> 
> 3. Someone mentioned somewhere that all the different versions of an
> image are stored in the same folder. I hope that is not a strict rule. I
> like to keep a repository with original images and then keep my edited
> versions in a separate folder tree. That makes backups a lot easier to
> manage. At the moment, that sort of workflow makes it difficult to find
> the edited versions of the pictures, but the new versioning feature will
> make it really easy! Whoo hoo! Assuming that I can save a new version
> somewhere else.

I am planning to make this configurable, but I think Martin may correct me 
there is not much configurability atm. At least for automatic saving. Maybe we 
need a way to specify the file location of the saved file manually.

> 
> 4. Is it possible to save the versioning relationships in metadata? 

Yes. At least, we spent a good amount of thought on this.

> I am
> concerned that the relationships will be lost if I move files around or
> restore part of the files from backup or something like that. If each
> file had a unique ID, e.g. a checksum, and the version relationships
> referenced those IDs, then it would be possible to restore the
> relationships even if the files were moved to new locations.

The history steps are saved in metadata. Files created by those steps are 
referenced by a number of criteria. Most importantly, every new file created 
by digikam will have assigned a UUID, that is not a checksum, but a random 
number. There are some other criteria, like a file hash, or simply the file 
path, but that's mostly for backup for files which dont have a UUID.
Of course, externally editing a picture will not change the UUID, but that 
can't be helped (could be solved in the "gimp" scenario described above)

Marcel