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

[Gilles Caulier]

On Monday 02 October 2006 13:45, Pedro Venda wrote:
> 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);

There is a file in B.K.O about.

> 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);

idem.

> 3. reindexing tags from picture metadata;

What do you mean exactly ?

> 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!);

see B.K.O

> 5. searching per date (across all albums, like already discussed in this
> list);

already implemented...

> 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);

Planed later than 0.9.0

>
> 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.

I would to said than if digiKam 0.9.0 do not include some new advanced 
features like versionning, it's to prevent huge problems to the 
implementation. There are a lots of changes between 0.8.x and 0.9.0, like 16 
bits/color/pixel support or Color Management for example witch are require a 
lot of changes in digikam core and DigikamImagePlugins. We are limited in 
time and ressources (developers). We cannot do all at the same time.

Gilles