[Digikam-users] Future direction of digikam?

[Arnd Baecker]

Hi Ravi,

let my try to answer your questions from my point of view:

On Fri, 9 Nov 2007, Ravi Swamy wrote:

> I'm wondering what the future direction is for digikam

Apart from the incremental improvements, which take
mainly part in the development of the upcoming 0.9.3 and
0.9.4 (See http://www.digikam.org/?q=about/releaseplan),
there is in parallel the development of
0.10. branch which uses KDE4. This, together with
a new database layout, will provide the basis for many new
features, addressing various of the wishes in the bug tracker
which require a major structural changes
For the new database scheme, see for example
  http://www.digikam.org/?q=node/256
Apart from this, the future direction is to a large extent
driven by users, which can vote for bugs and define
priorities in this way.
Moreover, contributions to the code are of course also
very well taken ... ;-)

> and who the target
> user is.  I'm a serious amateur and do a few paid things. I shoot about
> 75% RAW, 25% JPEG, 50-1000 shots per session.

Digikam is used by many normal amateurs and I am at least
aware of one professional whose main business is photography.
So it seems to cater well for a large range of purposes.

> I'm specifically interested in the "workflow" aspects.

The workflow aspect is definitively a very important one,
and in my opinion in this area a lot of improvements
are possible. Getting a  workflow design is non-trivial,
so any ideas/suggestions/ (code ;-) is very welcome!

>  I'm doing my yearly
> reevaluation and I'm thinking of switching from Picasa/UFraw/GIMP to Lightroom
> on my Macbook.

Lightroom is surely a good product, judging from the reviews
(So I am not going to bash it, in particular because I haven't used
it ;-).

> I'm checking out digikam too and trying to see where it's
> going.  After reading some comments in the bugzilla entry for the light table
> it seems like the authors were at least somewhat interested in cloning
> Aperture or Lightroom.

Well, digikam is surely not about cloning any of these applications,
but many requests by users of course arise from previous usage
of other applications ;-).

> I love open source software but its usually
> written for programmers by programmers not always what the end user wants.
> The comments on the light table bugzilla entry showed to me that the authors
> of digikam were different and actually listening to real photographers.

The good thing is that the authors are real photographers
(though non-professional ;-).

> If anyone is interested I could elaborate further.  If not thanks for
> a nice and improving program.

Surely, input is very welcome!
If it is about concrete feature wishes, they are best
done in terms of a wish in the bug tracker, so that nothing
of the discussion gets lost (in contrast to the mailing list here).
For a more general discussion about the workflow, this mailing
list might be the better place
(but with keeping in my mind, that at some point this
should lead to concrete wishes for the bug-tracker,
so that things can be improved step-by-step).

Hope these explanations help a bit to clarify the situation
and the development process (at least how I see things ...;-),

best, Arnd