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

[Anders Troberg]

> I suppose it can do that but in this day and age of 1Tb disk drives 
> that isn't often necessary is it?

Come back when the 4TB drives arrive, then it's not a problem for me. Then again, by then, I'll probably have more data anyway...

> However, I personally like having all my images from different root album paths in one overview.

I agree. I see it as a way to increase storage space and to organize, not to filter out content.

Hmm, perhaps a quick filter combo box in the the tool bar, which remembers previously used filters? Enter "scans" and it will only display the parts of the album that contains "scans" somewhere in the path/filename. That would also work as a quick-search. Perhaps that would be a quick-and-dirty solution? It would also fit nicely into the useage model of the "google generation".

It wouldn't be that much unlike the Search combo in Outlook (yeah, I'm ashamed, but they force me to use it at work).


-----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
Från: Geert Janssens [mailto:janssens-geert at telenet.be] 
Skickat: den 4 september 2009 16:00
Till: digikam-users at kde.org
Ämne: Re: [Digikam-users] Multiple album roots - what's the point?

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
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