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

[Mikkel Bækhøj Christensen]

On Fri, 2010-11-05 at 16:56 +0100, Marcel Wiesweg wrote:
> 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.
> 

I know, and I understand. I just wanted to give you my input at this
stage to make sure that the infrastructure can support the features at a
later stage. I am a software developer myself, so I understand the
complexity (although my contribution to digikam source has only been
very small so far).

> > 
> > 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?
> 

Good question. For dialogs, I think that there should be to buttons:
"Apply to this version" and "Apply to all versions"

For things without dialogs (like tags), there should be a setup option
for the default behaviour. The tags sidebar could also have 2 "Apply"
buttons as well, but normally I don't use the "Apply" button for tags.
Maybe I will, when we get versioning.

Alternatively, it could be implemented in the selection mechanism. There
could be different selection modes, e.g "select only the top/visible
version" or "select all versions". Then the selection would determine
which versions the attributes are applied to.

> > 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.

It would be good to be able to set up a default save location for the
digikam editor. That way one would easily be able to keep the entire
original folder tree strictly read-only.

I am very happy with all your answers. It sounds like you have already
thought of everything that I was concerned about! Thank you again for
your work.

Mikkel