[Digikam-devel] Photo management by content type

[julia.jacobson at arcor.de]

Hello everybody out there contributing to digiKam,

First of all thanks a lot for making digiKam the open source photo management application with the most advanced set of features.
Like other photo management applications, digiKam organizes photos according to the tags provided by the user. However, this approach has a serious drawback: The user can't really assign certain content types to images, which would add more structure to an image collection.
Currently it is not easy to mark images into categories like "satellite pictures", "micrographs", "portraits" or "landscape pictures". For each of these categories, I would tag images in a quite different way: A portrait might contain a tag indicating the name of the depicted person, whereas the magnification is a crucial feature of a micrograph. A satellite picture in turn does not really have an exact GPS coordinate, but  this is well feasible for a landscape.
This content-based management approach is actually the way how literature databases are organised and would also be perfectly suited for images.

What do you think about it and could you imagine possible drawbacks?