[Digikam-users] Newbie questions

[samr]

Hi there, 

I am a new digikam user, and I am very excited by the many possibilities 
offered my digikam. Congratulation to the development team! It is very 
convenient to have such a neat program that can manage photos, edit them, 
download from a camera, etc. (I just named 3 out of the hundreds of 
functions, many of which I have not yet discovered :-) )

However, despite attentive reading of the documentation, I still have some 
questions that remain unanswered, that I take the liberty to post here:

-I know that there is no (at least not yet) possibility to archive albums on 
removable media while keeping the relevant information in the database. But 
if I understand correctly, most of the information stored into the database 
is also saved in the EXIF and IPTC fields of the file. Consequently, if I 
archive an album on a CD, and then move it back to my collection, the 
information such as comments, tags, and ratings should be read from the file 
to the database. So I shouldn't loose any information, right?

-When you do nested albums, is there a setting that allows to see the pictures 
of the sub-albums when the parent album is selected? For example I have a 
top-level album named "Canada". It does not contain any picture, but a few 
sub-folders, each with the name of a photographer. When I am in the album 
view, if I select the top folder "Canada", no photo are listed. This is not a 
problem for the slide show, for there is a "recursive" option, but If I want 
to do a search for example, like photo in Album "Canada", with Tag "Bear", I 
have no picture, because there are no picture in the "Canada" folder, but 
only in its subfolder. So is there an option so that the albums behave like 
the tags? 

-Kipi plug-in related (I know this is not the best place to ask this 
question...) : I have used the gallery export plug-in to export an album to 
my online gallery 1.x. I had some encoding troubles : I have some accented 
letters in my comments, and these were messed up after the upload to my 
gallery. The problem is that I haven't found a way to set the encoding, 
neither in Digikam, nor in gallery. 

I thank you very much for any bits of information!

Sam