[Digikam-users] IPTC and tags, again... Questions to the team

[Daniel Bauer]

Hello digiKam team

During the discussions about tags and how to save them to IPTC keywords once 
again I was thinking about the purpose and use of tags and IPTC keywords. I 
have some questions to the digiKam team, but first let me explain my point of 
view:

I think there are at least 2 different needs depending on what tags and 
metadata should be used for. (I've pointed to this in the "saving tags and 
rating into IPTC tags..."-thread march last year):

a) "home use" and needs of digiKam itself:

- digiKam itself needs tag trees to be saved in IPTC to be able to re-create 
them in digiKam tags hierarchy in database.
- for "home use" you want to tag your pictures on topics to sort and quickly 
find them again

I think this is very well implemented now and once its completely polished 
these needs are met perfectly.

b) "professional use"

here tags and IPTC-keywords are two completely different things. To explain:

*tags* could be: 
- work for customers -> company X -> job Y
- free work -> models -> Susi
(this is personal information to organize my archive, but nothing of it should 
go into IPTC - like the real name of the model is important for me, but often 
should not be published and may not appear in the image file)

while *keywords* could be:
- emotions -> love -> parent/child (I know "/" cant be in a keyword... :-) )
- people -> groups -> families
(this is "public data" that I want in IPTC)

My personal approach here is:

- use digiKam tags for the tags (leaving "Save image tags as 'Keywords' tag" 
unchecked in Metadata settings), which suits perfect for this

- use the "edit IPTC Metadata" plugin for the IPTC keywords, which is good 
right now for single entries, but not yet for setting metadata in many files 
and also needs some other improvements in regard of using pre-defined word 
lists for consistency of keywording etc.

My questions to the digiKam team right now are:

- what is your target audience (target user group)? 
- if both groups ("home use" and "professional") are targeted, is there 
already a concrete plan about future developments in this regard? If so, is 
this plan public and can I find it somewhere? 

(I have some ideas, but I don't want to make unnecessary noise by throwing in 
thoughts about things that have already been discussed and decided by people 
who know better than I do)

Let me know.

kind regards

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Bauer photographer Basel Switzerland
professional photography: http://www.daniel-bauer.com
Madagascar special: http://www.sanic.ch