[Digikam-users] how do you select images for slide show?

[Jean-François Rabasse]

Hello Tred,

A small comment (I personally often do that kind of work,
selecting a list of images from inside Digikam, then doing
something with them with external tools).


On Wednesday 08 May 2013 19:15:06 Eildert Groeneveld wrote:

> I see what you are doing, and, yes, I understand how it works.
> It just bothers me that we do not have a simpler setup.
> Injecting tags is all very well, but ofcourse it triggers
> backup requirements for each single jog included in the
> slideshow, where actually you would just need one file or
> directory that contains a link to the original file.
> implementing this on top of the batch queue facility:
> this already allows you to collect various images as you
> screen them. Being able to somehow output theses filenames
> would already be enough, a little bash or perl script could do
> the rest.

>From what you wrote above, I suppose you're comfortable with
scripting.

A very simple and fast way to exchange images file names lists
between Digikam and command line tools is to use the KDE
clipboard copy/paste functionalities.

You need first to mark and select your images, several solutions
have been given on that thread, structured tags, coloured flags,
etc.

When you have all your selected images in the Digikam thumbnails
view, type Ctrl-A to select all, then Ctrl-C to copy to
clipboard.

Now, in a separate terminal window, you can paste the list and
feed a command, it can be saving to a file :
     cat > files.list
type the command then paste and end input with a Ctrl-D.

NB: KDE paste is Shift-Ctrl-V, not the usual Ctrl-V

The file files.list contains all the pathnames of your selected
images. The default format used by the clipboard is URLs,
not just pathnames, so you'll get something like:
     file:///base-dir/.../image.jpg

To store just pathnames, you can « enhance » the above command :
     cat | sed 's/file:..//' > files.list

You're done.

Now, if you wish to build your own processing tools to resize
images, move them where you want them, etc., you can script some
processing based on Remco's example :
     for a in *
     do
         convert $a -resize ... etc

but using your files list, e.g. :
     for a in `cat files.list`
 	do
         ...

You can also adapt your script(s) to read pathnames directly
on standard input, thus skipping the files list step.

The overall process is really fast once you get used to it,
select images using Digikam markers, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C,
and Shift-Ctrl-V + Ctrl-D in a command line window.
And if you write your own commands, you will do exactly what
you wish. It's an alternative to the DK batch queue manager.

Regards,
Jean-François