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

[Gilles Caulier]

2008/11/24 Jürgen Scholz <juergen at kernkraft400.com>

> 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.
>


Thanks for your feedback. it's very instructive...

What do you mean by file-browsing mode exactly ?

In digiKam for KDE4, you can set more than one root album, including
removable and networks repositories. Each one are add to album tree view on
the left side of album GUI. This is not enough ?

Best
Gilles Caulier


>
> 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
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>
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