[Digikam-users] User experience (or bugs, hopes and wishes)

[Pedro Venda]

On Monday 02 October 2006 11:58, Birkir A. Barkarson wrote:
> To those who made it all the way down here, thanks for reading.  Hope
> you have comments to make. In my mind an application with these features
> should be a real killer-app when it comes to applying metadata to images
> especially with people who use services like Flickr.
> I look forward to seeing Digikam go from strength to strength.

Hello Birkir,

That was a nice review and it takes some dedication and effort to do what you 
did (in my point of view).

I too have been searching for a good photo organizer app. Before using digikam 
for everything, I used picasa, and don't get me wrong: picasa it is really 
really good.

The issues that led me to abandon it were the following:
1. weak photo editor (cool but only useful for very small tweaks);
2. runs on Linux - good, but under wine (ARGH!!);
3. the windows client refused to use my data partition (ext3 - before you 
label me as "totally dumb", know that I'm using an ext3 IFS native driver for 
windows and it accesses the partition perfectly for all other applications);
4. slow development cycle, especially for the Linux port;
5. free but not opensource (yes, I'm a geek, but I sleep better like this);
6. runs under wine (did I already mention that?);

Digikam, on the other side, lacks some other features that would make it much 
better than picasa:
1. a hand tool for progressively zooming photos (like picasa - sorry);
2. multiple tag search (this is possible but it's not that simple. something 
like a direct text form where we'd input space separated tags would be much 
nicer);
3. reindexing tags from picture metadata;
4. a slightly better album interface (a single click on a picture would simply 
do the "View..." action achieved by the right click menu. Then some visible 
Next and Previous (eventually with small thumbnails for visual guide) to 
navigate... like picasa - sorry!);
5. searching per date (across all albums, like already discussed in this 
list);
6. picture versioning or meta-changes. picture edits would be made in the 
metadata database and would only be written on request (like picasa - sorry);

I'm trying to gather some time to research through the bugzilla to find 
similar feature requests and put some on my own (those not already found).

Dont take the 6 improvement request as defects! Digikam is a great tool and 
better by far than all others that I've tried before! There are only a 
handfull of expensive commercial apps that top it.

Cheers,
-- 

Pedro João Lopes Venda
email: pjvenda at pjvenda org
http://www.pjvenda.org
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