[Digikam-users] Good example (?) on Digikam site

[Chris G]

On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 01:15:25AM +0100, Gerhard Kulzer wrote:
> Am Sunday 20 January 2008 schrieb Chris G:
> > I have just been pottering around the Digikam web site and spotted the
> > following:-
> >
> >     http://www.digikam.org/?q=node/103
> >
> > It's a brilliant illustration of what I want an enhancement for, look
> > at the order of the albums in the TODO album.  The months are not in
> > date order.  I want to be able to either specify that the albums are
> > sorted by date (i.e. creation date of the directory) or (even better)
> > to be able to drag and drop them to the order I want.
> >
> > I have added wish 156186 to bugzilla for this.
> 
> I'm not sure if your wish can't be fulfilled otherwise.
> For example I create my albums so that the alphabetical ordering works:
> 2008
> --0108 for January 2008
> --0208 ...
> etc.
> It also works with winter, spring etc using q108, q208...
> 
> I export a lot of images to galleries, and there the distinction of e.g. 0108 
> is very usefull since you know exactly from which album to pick the images to 
> upload.
> 
I am already using almost exactly what you suggest but I have a few
issues with it which would be avoided if my wish 156186 came true.

The issues are:-

    1 - In many cases I don't know the month that the pictures were
    taken.  These are films from the 1960s and onwards and I really
    want to store them in chronological order (which I do know
    approximately) within a year.  OK, I can number the films but
    then when I find one that needs to be put between some I have
    already got in digikam I have a re-numbering problem.

    2 - My photographs span the millenium, in fact they go right back
    to the 1960s, thus to get correct ordering I have to put the whole
    four digit year.

    3 - That redundancy niggles me, in your example you have the year
    twice, it's in the 'parent' 20008 album and in the child 0108 album.

    4 - I prefer albums to have all text names, those digits on the
    front are somehow clumsy - yes, it's just an aesthetic thing but I
    like 'elegance' in the things I use, including software.

    5 - You can't mix months, seasons, etc. in one year.  In quite a
    few cases I have some pictures where I happen to know the exact
    date (and thus I can put them in a month) and others are just
    'summer', or 'end of the year'.


So, yes, your solution works and I'm already using it but I believe my
wish would be a significant improvement.

Another thought I had which would provide what I want (and have some
of the advantages of your scheme too) would be to separate the album's
directory name on disk from its title in Digikam.  Then you could call
the album on disk 2008-01 but give it a title of "January, winter
scenes" for use within Digikam.  Albums with no title added could use
the directory name.  There's already the comments field in the album
properties, maybe the first line of this could provide an alternative
title/name.

-- 
Chris Green