[Digikam-users] RAW workflow and tags

[Leonardo Giordani]

Hi all digiKam users,

first of all I wish to say that digiKam is a really good program that helps me 
a lot in my photographic work.

I want to share with you the workflow I follow in managing my photos, to share 
and discuss with you some thoughts about it and how digiKam can help us in 
this.

Since I work with a digital reflex I'm mostly interested in the management of 
the RAW conversions. Since I own many photos I'm interested also in tagging.
(I'm using digiKam 0.9x.)

My workflow by now is:

1 Download all RAW photos with digiKam in albums automatically named basing on 
date
2 Delete very bad ones
3 Choose the best ones and copy them in another album
4 Process each chosen photo with UFRaw (creating a .ufraw file)
5 Batch processing .ufraw files (creating .tif file)
6 Process each TIFF with The Gimp (sharpening, saturation, crop, etc)
7 Batch converting .tif in .jpeg with digiKam
8 Tagging JPEG

Periodically I backup original RAW, chosen RAW with .ufraw and TIFFs on DVDs.

There are some point where I'm not at ease with this workflow: I just list 
them, being conscious that probably that are a consequence of a wrong 
approach of mine; but perhaps they expose issues that can be fixed in 
digiKam.

For each photo I have a RAW file, a .ufraw, a TIFF file and a JPEG file. 
Sometimes I have more than one TIFF per RAW, for example when there are 
exposition issues (I develop a .hi.tif and a .lo.tif and then merge them with 
The Gimp). Having all these files in the same directory/album is not good 
because:

 * TIFF preview is slow (can be fixed by a powerful computer, but is always 
much slower the JPEG or RAW preview)
 * Seeing the same photo in 3 versions is not useful
 * Multiple TIFFs can be named with various suffixes, which are not always 
visible since some file names are truncated because of length (e.g. 
20090503-101323-000059.cr2)
 * ufraw files are not understood by digiKam (it does not show them)

So one question is: would it be useful and possible (I'm going to ask 
developers too) to embed a WORKFLOW in digiKam, so that I simply see one 
object per photo, that object representing all files that belong to that 
photo (i.e. RAW, TIFF, JPEG, .ufraw, .txt, etc)?

Tagging is also a problem: if I tag RAW photos than I have to tag TIFFs and 
JPEGs again, with an high probabilty of forgetting tags (already happened 
many times). Well, than it is really boring :)
By now I only tag JPEGs, but tagging RAWs and TIFFs is useful: sometimes I 
have not the time of processing RAWs and when I am looking for a particular 
subject I would see this RAW photos too. I solved this by using three tags 
(RAW, TIFF and JPEG), but this is a nightmare since I must tag each photo 
basing on the format, which means a lot of work and a lot of errors.

I think digiKam lacks a WORKFLOW view of its objects. For example: I cannot 
simply click on a photo and see if I already converted it to TIFF (and with 
which program) or I already processed it in a particular step (for example 
sharpening). Moreover: I follow a certain workflow, others can have different 
needs, so it could be interesting to be able to define a personal flow or set 
of steps.

Another example: I cannot only view JPEGs of each objects (now I exploit this 
by using three tags - JPEG, TIFF and RAW - but it is not the best solution).
Or for example I cannot simply list all photos that have not yet been 
converted from RAW to TIFF to continue a previously stopped work.
Or what about a program that saves strange files to record what has been done 
on an image: ufraw files are this, another program that can be mentioned is 
hugin, which saves a file with the description of the paramentes used to 
create an image.

I try to define more precisely my idea of assisted workflow:
I define a set of steps linking them with a particular digiKam action or an 
external program:
 * "RAW->ufraw": ufraw <file.RAW>
 * "ufraw->TIFF": ufraw-batch *.ufraw
 * "TIFF processing": gimp <file.tif>
 * TIFF->JPEG: digiKam internal
Then I click on an image and a popup menu appears with only the first step 
available; I select it and ufraw is run on the RAW image.

Well, sorry if my thoughts seems stange or stupid; I'm experiencing these 
limitations in my work with digiKam (and other OS softwares) and since I 
don't know if they are shared and solved by you I just tried to identify a 
solution.

Thank you for your answers in advance

Leonardo Giordani