[Digikam-users] Workflow with raw+jpeg

Wed Mar 8 18:49:25 GMT 2006

Duncan explained quite well what belongs to this thematic complex, and as he
extended the original extent of my mail pretty much I will just take the
opportunity to emphasize what I see as the baseline of a "clustering" feature.

* Signalising that some image files belong to a group - besides doing this
through tagging - can clarify relations between files. Especially when you use
raw files you will probably end up with more than one version derived from this
digital negative, but even when you just create a downscaled version for web
purposes from a jpeg you already have a group of files with a close
relationship. Parent-Children is a good naming scheme for this

* At least for my working style it makes sense to keep the files of maybe a
short trip in one folder. Having additional visible information that certain
files belong together (maybe a dotted line around the group) helps when scanning
an album.

* The possibility to hide the children and unfold the group additionally would
increase the oversight.

Now for Duncans idea of using hashes to identify the images: Digikam is already
quite robust when it comes to moving files around albums as long as the file
names are not changed. Hashes would increase this robustness even to the case
when somebody renames a file. However calculating checksums takes some time (and
I *am* already impatient when waiting for the thumbnails to get generated) so
this might best be deferred to a background thread.

The idea of saving and re-applying actions to images would mean a complete
scriptable interface for the image editor - this sounds alluring but will be a
major challenge in itself. Again it is a matter of preferences and personal
workflow, but I myself do all major editing in gimp and do not use the digikam
image editor so often. Ufraw does a fantastic job for converting the raw files,
and the possibility to save the conversion profile really lays the foundation
for iterative refinement of images.

My personal focus when using digikam is organising and reviewing my images.
Therefore I welcome all improvements in this field very much. The new layout,
the introduction of the timeline are all steps I do appreciate very much. Having
the possibility to tag groups of files and to do this with lesser mouse
movements would make it even better for me.

The usability of digikam is already really high. I have introduced my 72 years
old father, who was computer-illiterate before, into linux and digikam and he
does get along very good! Therefore I send a big thank you to you, Gilles!

regards

Markus
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