[Digikam-users] dealing with galeries

[jdd-gmane]

Hello,
This subject have been raised several times recently, but I think only
in partial way, so I will try to recollect all here for better
understanding.

* there are export scripts for online most known public galeries
(flicker...). I beg that the export filter makes sure all the
necessary files are created and uploaded, BUT I'm pretty sure there is
no reverse backup, that is the online content is not duplicated
anywhere on the hard drive (may be it's not necessary for flickr)

* there are export scripts for "local" repositories, for example html
export. These scripts makes a copy of the photos and deliver a package
ready to be uploaded

none of these systems is really satisfactory, mostly because modern
photos are hudge (in Mb) and many (great number):

- for the online repos, the full high res photo is not uploaded, OR if
uploaded the real time connection system is not very handy because it
may need several *days* to upload pĥotos and keeping digikam open for
a so long time is not nice. Is digikam able to recover in case of
connection lost?

- for local export, the high def images are duplicated, wich is a
waste of place if ever the HDD is big enough to accomodate them :-)

So, I think, we could have a great advantage to have a somewhat
centralized digikam structure.

I mean a global tree for the original photos + the export part

I see three levels for images:

+ original photos from the camera. These ones, at the exception of
extremely bad ones (and this can be discussed) should never be touched!
+ edited original photos: the one we work on with DigiKam. Here we
have to remove all what we don't want now, trim, change anything necessary
+ The export files. there could be folders for each export filter with
the necessary files and *links* to the edited original photos

so a tree like this:

DigiKam
 DigiKam/originals
 DigiKam/edited
 DigiKam/flicker
 DigiKam/html
(and so on)

and then some sort of rsync script to update online, preferably
beginning with low resolution photos and ending with originals (if
necessary).

and some sort of backup utility (may be so easy no utility is
necessary :-) copying all the DigiKam stuff to an external HDD :-)

Such way I could manage my 80Gb/20000 photos collection.

I think this would needs very litle changes from DigiKam, mainly link
replacing copy in the export scripts

Importing of photos uploaded by third party people could be another
enhancement, But I have little experience in that.

I'm not able to code such export filters, but can read C code and give
usefull help

thanks
jdd

-- 
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http://valerie.dodin.org
http://news.opensuse.org/2009/04/13/people-of-opensuse-jean-daniel-dodin/