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

[Pedro Venda]

On Monday 02 October 2006 12:59, Gilles Caulier wrote:
> 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.

cool! I'll check it out :)

>
> > 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.

cool.

>
> > 3. reindexing tags from picture metadata;
>
> What do you mean exactly ?

We've discussed this before (just now). It's about rebuilding the tag indexing 
from the pictures. Suppose I loose my digikam.db; I need to rebuild it from 
the picture's metadata themselves.

> > 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

cool!

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

hmmm, I'm not sure you've understood what I meant.
If I do a date search, the result I get is organized by album and by date; not 
only by date.
If in two consecutive albums I have these two pictures:
album 1:
2006-03-01.jpg
2006-09-01.jpg
album 2:
2006-01-01.jpg
2006-06-01.jpg

What I get from a date search is the following:
album 2:
2006-01-01.jpg
2006-06-01.jpg
album 1:
2006-03-01.jpg
2006-09-01.jpg

What I'd like to get is the following:
2006-01-01.jpg
2006-03-01.jpg
2006-06-01.jpg
2006-09-01.jpg

Two of the pictures ended up wrong in the search result due to being in 
different albums.

>
> > 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

nice!

>
> > 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.

Absolutely! I (and many others) really appreciate your dedication and effort 
into developing this great software in the opensource model.
A big thank you!

Cheers,
-- 

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