[Digikam-users] Group by filename

[Ulf Rompe]

Hi all,

we would like to get some feedback on a patch we have been working on 
for quite some time now. It introduces a configurable "group by 
filename" action to the album view which lets you automatically combine 
files with matching name parts into a group.
A filename based grouping feature is key for our workflow, and we could 
imagine lots of use cases for other people's workflows. In fact, we 
found the feature request we attached the patch to after implementing a 
first version for our own purpose, so it seems there is at least some 
demand for it.

Find a short screencast of the current functionality here:
https://plus.google.com/107260423308980038020/posts/GgpPK27Y3fq

As you can see, there are three configuration options:

 1. The default setting is set up to combine RAW and JPEG files. If you
    have 123.nef and 123.jpg in your current selection, they will be
    grouped, leaving 123.jpg on top.
 2. The second option configures grouping of files featuring common
    appendices added by well known image editors. If you have, for
    example, some of 123.jpg, 123_v1.jpg, 123-Edit.jpg, 123_shotwell.jpg
    and "123 (edited).jpg" in your current selection, they will be grouped.
 3. The third option is for advanced users, giving you the option to
    manually tweak the expression used for the matching. The editable
    pulldown is already populated with the expressions used to realize
    the two options described above as well as an example that
    implements our very own grouping logic. Whatever you try here, the
    previous state will always be remembered and accessible through the
    pulldown. Just fool around and see what happens.


Technically, this feature is implemented as a patch against digiKam 
core. While we would have loved to implement it as a plugin, we didn't 
find a way to hook a plugin into the album view and the context menu. 
The flexible matching part is based on the popular regular expression 
syntax. Gilles, we know you are not a fan of regular expressions, but we 
couldn't think of another way to achieve a flexible matcher like this 
without overcomplicating things. We just hope that if you would totally 
hate regular expressions you would have closed the feature request 
#318357 before someone accepted the challenge to work on it. Of course, 
the offer I made in my comment to the G+ post above still holds.

While we consider the patch ready for prime time now, we would like to hear:

 1. Is the UI intuitive enough, especially from a KDE point of view?
 2. Could you think of other predefined grouping options than the two
    introduced above? Of course we would like to serve most users with
    easy defaults, leaving the manual expression editing to power users.
 3. Would it be realistic to get the feature into digiKam in the near
    future?


Best regards, Ulf
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