[Digikam-users] linking instead of copying

[D. R. Evans]

Arnd Baecker said the following at 01/04/2008 08:42 AM :

> 
> Well, sometimes it just means, that your mail has fallen through
> the cracks ... ;-)
> 
>> One can always do it outside digikam I suppose,  but it just seems a
>> mite clumsy to switch to konqueror for this one task.
> 
> To get virtual albums the concept of tags is the
> way to go in digikam:
> Just assign a tag to all images which should appear in a
> virtual album under that name and access it via the "Tags"
> sidebar on the left.
> 

That really isn't an equivalent concept, though, and doesn't seem hugely
practical for a few reasons (not all of equal importance, of course):

1. Using tags means that only digikam is aware of the pictures in a virtual
album. So one loses all of the functionality that the OS and file manager
provides for files. So you can't for example, right click on a picture in
Konq and e-mail it. Or copy the album to a CD with Konq. Or share it with a
Windows user via a samba share. Or grant access via a mounted fuse
filesystem. Right there, this all seems like a showstopper.

2. It confuses the concept of a file qua file with the picture with that is
in the file. What I mean by this is that to create a virtual album of, say,
pictures that one might use for a calendar, one has to imbue the pictures
with some concept in common and give that concept a label (such as
"possible-calendar-pictures"), which is then used to put the pictures in
the virtual folder. But the pictures really have nothing in common as
pictures. So one's natural mental model (well, *my* natural mental model,
anyway) is thrown into disarray. Maybe no one else finds this a problem.
(As a protocol designer, though, this violates my mental layering, which is
almost always a bad thing.)

3. If the database gets hosed, I assume that the virtual folders became
equally hosed and can't be reconstructed by simply rebuilding. (Maybe I'm
wrong about that, but it seems at least plausible that the tagging
information is kept in the database, so you're in real trouble if the
database ever goes south.)

I'm not saying that the virtual-albums-through-tags implementation is
useless, not at all; I am saying that at least for some users, it doesn't
seem like a solution that will work with sufficient robustness. (For
example, I for one share everything via samba to a Windows machine that my
wife uses; she not unnaturally wants to be able to look in a folder of
pictures of our children. If the pictures in that directory are created via
ordinary links, then she can browse the directory and see pictures; if it's
all just entries in a digikam database, then she won't see anything.)

So I guess I am pleading/arguing for a feature that digikam would allow one
to "copy" a picture by creating a link, mimicking what one can do inside
Konq. For now, I'll just create the albums manually myself using Konq.

Thanks very much for the helpful reply, though.

  Doc