[Digikam-users] Digikam new user, first comments

[Julien Touche]

Hello digikam users,

As I plan to travel a lot in the coming month, I bought a netbook and
try to use linux/digikam as my photo workflow station.

So my 2 cents about it
- when working with RAW/NEF+JPG, it's hard to handle tags/rating/...
on both file. already a bug case
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=126149
I'm asking myself if a similar option would be needed for bracketing
but it would be more complex as most people would probably take
different rating but similar tags.
- some dialog windows are too big for netbook screen (like advanced
slideshow), so you need to play with alt+left click.
- some actions like export, insert iptc/xmp do not seem doable through
context menu/keyboard shortcut on a selection (one or multiple photos)
- search statusbar does'nt have google like option or regexp search.
keywords like 'date:' 'year:' 'rating:' 'tag:' with boolean operatos
- why always making search statusbar disappear in full screen ? in
some case, user will want to keep it. maybe a shortcut would be useful
to regain it.
- for main toolbar, I really think, user need to have the "classical"
options to have text+icon, icon only, text only and small icon option
- In view mode (maybe light table too), I would want to be able to
display some metadata (filename, date, aperture, ...)
- keyboard shortcuts: it seems many are not available through
'Configure shortcuts': add tags, add iptc/xmp (after checking 'edit
IPTC' exists)
some panel are pretty complete but maybe a quick way would be useful.
something like shortcut, name of iptc/tag and free text entry with
automated suggestions.
- after saving metadata and trying to read photo in another software,
it seems rating is not saved
I found this as related
http://osdir.com/ml/digikam-users/2010-08/msg00006.html
This interesting page http://trac.yorba.org/wiki/PhotoTags shows how
rating is handled by different soft. Sadly, Digikam is not mentioned
for ratings.
My preference would be Xmp.xmp.rating. Maybe it could be a
user-configurable option or when exporting to other soft ?


On the very good points, I'm impressed by the number of plugins, the
calendar/location view. We are really in the category of pro tools, I
think.


Thanks a lot for your work and happy new year.
Best regards,

Julien