[Digikam-users] Multiple album roots - what's the point?

[Geert Janssens]

On Friday 4 September 2009, Chris G wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 04, 2009 at 02:37:59PM +0200, Anders Troberg wrote:
> > Ah, OK. For me, the multiple root is mostly a way to spread data over
> > several disks, to avoid running out of space.
>
> I suppose it can do that but in this day and age of 1Tb disk drives
> that isn't often necessary is it?
>
I tend to disagree. In a networked environment the ability to have multiple 
root albums is very useful. Not for lack of diskspace, but to setup multiple 
image databases, and configure only some for different client machines.

> > May I suggest that you get a bigger screen? :)
>
> My screen is quite big enough already!  :-)   It's a 20" running at
> 1600x1200.
>
> It's not really the *space* occupied by those extra albums but the
> messiness and distraction.  Instead of just seeing the stuff I want
> there are other bits which tend to appear at random because their
> initial letters, not surprisingly, don't follow any useful logic.
>
You are free to organise your top level directories in such a way that they do 
exhibit a useful logic. You suggested in an earlier mail that you wanted to 
see only directories from one year. Then organize your top-level directories 
per year. I do agree this doesn't really map to all situations though.

> Using directories/folders on my computer (rather than digikam) I'd
> simply 'cd scans' and an 'ls' would just show me my scans albums with
> no distraction.  Similarly 'cd documents' and 'ls' would show me my
> documents directories and nothing else.  If I had web pages organised
> in the same sort of hierarchy then I'd get the same sort of
> separation.
>
I'm afraid it's no good comparing command line tools with gui's. They have 
rather different working models. A closer comparison would be between Dolphin 
and Digikam. You will see that both tools have a similar sidebars both showing 
you all image directories that are in sight. Opening one image directory 
doesn't hide the others.

The same goes for webpages. You can't compare that with Dolphin or Digikam. 
The website designer fully decides on the layout, so there's no convention 
there at all. The closest match I can imagine would be running firefox with 
your bookmarks in the sidebar. Also there, you can't start firefox with a 
different set of bookmarks depending on which website you wish to see.

> It *can* be done with digikam by wrapping a script around the startup
> and using multiple digikamrc files but it's a bit of a bodge and it
> doesn't seem as if it would be difficult to build it into digikam.
>
> All that's needed is a comamnd line option to set the root album path.
>
I think that looking at digikam as "an application" and a root album path as 
"a object to open with digikam" is not quite the metaphor being used in 
digikam. Digikam is more of an "image manager" like Dolphin is a more generic 
"file manager". In this context, it doesn't really make sense to open a set of 
files in a file manager, but not being able to navigate to the other files 
available on the system, just because you don't need them in this session.

I'm not against your suggestion per se, though. However, I personally like 
having all my images from different root album paths in one overview.

I think a more flexible solution would be to introduce "Album tags", similar 
to the image tags that exist already, together with a way to filter the album 
list based on these tags. Part of this work is probably already in digikam: 
albums can be assigned a "Category", but there's no way to filter on this 
categories.

Just my thoughts on this though...

Geert