[Digikam-users] Some questions/feature requests

[gerlos]

Hello everyone!
I just installed digiKam 1.2 (from the repositories) on my shiny new Macbook 
Pro running KUbuntu 10.04, and played for the first time with the batch 
processing tool. 
I've always used imagemagick for this kind of things, but since everything is 
new, I wanted trying something new ;-)

First of all: kudos! It's really a great tool!

Second (question): I've seen that the batch processing tool works on one image 
at a time, so it doesn't use my dual core CPU at its maximum. Is it possible 
to make it process more images in parallel, instead of one image after the 
other?

I think that the default behaviour is really good for normal usage, it lets us 
do other things when it's running, like editing other photos. But you know, 
today I needed to work on ~400 images. It took ~2 hours, and looking at CPU 
usage when the batch processing tool was running, I felt that there were a lot 
of CPU cycles wasted... ;-)

Third (feature request): today I needed to batch adjust levels, resize images, 
reduce noise, increase sharpness, and to find the best parameters for my set of 
photos I edited some of them in the editor. I like that the tools in the 
editor "remember" the parameters you set last time you used them, and this 
thing speeds a lot editing work.
But wouldn't it be nice if when one adds a tool in the batch processing tool, 
it got the latest parameters used in the editor?

This way, for example, I could set white balance parameters in the editor for 
a single photo, then add a bunch of photos to the batch processing tool, add 
the white balance tool, and immediately get that values that I found 
interactively. This speeds a lot the configuration.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure if my explanation is clear... today I have some 
problems with my English :-/

Regards
gerlos


-- 
"Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do
more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do 
something else. The trick is the doing something else."
           < http://gerlos.altervista.org >
 gerlos  +- - - >  gnu/linux registred user #311588