[Digikam-users] digiKam file browsing mode / using as image browser

[Jürgen Scholz]

Dear digiKam community,

I have followed this mailing list for a while without posting, until  
now ... you guys seem to be a friendly and helpful bunch. I hope we  
get results here. ;-)

First: digiKam is a wonderful photo management program as it is.  
Probably 99% of all users will never get to it's limitations and I'm  
quite happy that everybody - including me - can use it. Please don't  
take any offense, since I mean no harm with my limited abilities to  
express myself in english. ;-)

My inquiry is a bit like a feature request, which rather belongs into  
the bug tracker. But I think my issue could require a little bit of  
community discussion, I'm posting here hoping that many people,  
especially the regulars and developers, offer their ideas and  
opinions, since the first know the program fairly well and the latter  
put a lot of hard work into the program.

Here's the main thing:
My parents own a little business which handles masonry work. Two years  
ago all these machines were operated with Windows 2000 and had AcdSee  
5 to view and print photos stored on an old NT4 Server. Somehow I  
managed to change all machines to kubuntu, which basically is a bless.
But acdsee did the job as image browser very, very well. One can  
easily browse a directory tree, move photos around by cut'n'paste and  
rotate images and such things. Additionally version 5 included a  
simple print tool which easily allows to print 4, 6, 8 or 20  
thumbnails on one page (this was later removed in favor of photoslate,  
I think).
AcdSee is no longer an option with ubuntu, since it does not work with  
wine and managing virtual machines with virtualbox is way to  
complicated for "just browsing images", I think.

There are quite a few tools, which are able to show images and  
thumbnails. They even come with the kubuntu-desktop meta-package.
This includes:

  - konqueror: It's fast. But that's it. It is complicated to navigate  
when used in the picture browsing mode. There is no tool that allows  
to print multiple images on one pice of paper. Additionally it can't  
do easy photo manipulation stuff like rotating, adjusting brightness  
and contrast, etc.

  - Gwenview: It's also fast, but it lacks the cut'n'paste method to  
move pictures around and for some reason printing takes ages with our  
printer. Also there isn't a printing wizard for printing multiple  
images on one page. (My bug report/feature request for the cut'n'paste  
thing hasn't been touched for over a year. I'm afaraid it probably  
won't be addressed in the future.)

  - Dolphin: Hasn't got the filesystem tree on the left side and  
therefore is not an option.

  - digiKam: It's really, really fast due to it's database backed  
thumbnail store. You can move pictures around with cut'n'paste. The  
printing assistand is lovely and is featurerich. I don't use all the  
features this thing got! :-D

    The only problem with digiKam is: Over the past ~8 years we  
collected quite a number of photos. The last time I checked it were  
around 16GB. These photos are all stored on a NFS server (replaced the  
NT4 server). These 16GB are not concentrated in on directory, but  
lying around everywhere in the directory structure (eg. together  
with .odts corresponding to a specific job).
    So it's necessary to set the whole /nfs/server/data directory tree  
as digiKams image store. For me this means digiKam will go over 60,000  
documents each time it starts up. This takes a long time, especially  
with NFS. Furthermore it's not possible to use the database  
corresponding to the /nfs/server/data-structure on more than one  
computer at a time.

Until now I did not have a better idea than to integrate a file- 
browsing-mode into digiKam. This could be accessible on the left side  
of the window (like media, home and / in konqueror). It should allow  
to browse to any directory accessible to the user, show thumbnails  
there and allow to rotate, print and such stuff.
This would certainly make it easyer to use kubuntu for us. From my  
point of view it seems this also could be true for many other users  
switching from Windows with AcdSee or comparable image management tools.

What do you think?
Have I gotten something horribly wrong?
Have you any ideas how I can cope with the situation without writing a  
single line of code?
- I really would appreciate to hear from you.

Thank you that you took the time to read all this.

Bye,
  juergen