[Digikam-users] Does no one ever want "custom order" in an album?

[Arnd Baecker]

On Tue, 2 Sep 2008, [ISO-8859-1] "Sveinn í Felli (IMAP)" wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Chris G wrote:
> >
> > I want to select pictures randomly from various places (i.e. from
> > various different Digikam albums) and place them in a new album in a
> > specific order which has nothing to do with their dates, alphanumeric
> > file name or anything of that sort (no pun intended!).
>
> Does tagging the pictures not work your way ? In tag view
> only the pics porting a specific tag are shown, then ordered
> by either name/path/date/size/rating.

No, that is not enough: For slideshows (etc.) a custom ordering
is needed. This ordering will be not chronologic, so
sorting by date does not do the job.

On the technical side this means to add a new structure
to the database which contains the information about ordering.
This could be in the form of a list of image IDs.
This mechanism only needs to be "activated" for a
view (album view, tag view, searches?, dates view?)
when a re-ordering has taken place.
There are various aspects to be thought of in the implementation:
- deleting images
- adding images
- a visual feedback
- ...
Maybe one should restrict the possibility of re-ordering
to the tags view and album view. Tracking back
which images got removed for searches or dates view can be
a bit too tricky (and is IMO not really necessary).

In my opinion, a step needed before is to
solve "WISH: Sort images by date - even when spanning albums"
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=134389
Having a view without album separators (both for dates view
and tags view) would be the basis to change the ordering
of the images by moving them around by drag-and-drop.

So to summarize, it would be a really nice features,
but will require quite a few internal changes ...

Best, Arnd