Coming from Picasa Desktop - help

[bjnovick]

First, thanks for everyone's input!  I imagine with the end of life of Picasa
there are many others like me who are looking for solution.  I checked out
almost all the other options, but none seem to be as close as Digikam is.    

Let me give you all a little more details on the workflow for our family.  I
take the photos, download them to our archive, and organize them into a
structure on disk.  Currently we have about 75000+ photos.  I tag them with
key information such as who we visited, where we visited, event that I took
them at (i.e. dance recital, etc..), key family moment, etc...  At that
point the images can be searched and are organized.  Great, I can do the
same in Digikam and in some cases even more efficiently!    

However, that is not the end of the story.  Sometime later, my wife wants to
create what is equivalent to a photo album or scrap book that you might find
on your coffee table.  This gets shared with others either through
slideshows/email/web or sent off to be printed and sent to family members. 
She has no interest in how the photos are stored on disk.  She wants the
"virtual" album to exist and be persistent so a year or two or 20 from now,
when she wants, she can look back and see what photo's were used.  She is
going to pick from the pool of photos and is not trying to organize the
photos.  Picasa has 2 things in the view that makes this easy: 1) a
Folder/Tree section which is equivalent to Digikam's Albums.  It can be
traversed just like the album view in Digikam  2) a "Picasa Album" section
which shows a virtual collection of photos.  It is these virtual collections
that are more akin to the coffee table photo album.  

In picasa these are the total steps she needs to take:

1) Click create album and give it a name
2) She searches through the pictures I have taken by either traversing the
tree structure or searching tags.  When she finds a photo that she wants she
puts it in a tray by hitting a short cut combination (I don't remember the
key combo).
3) When she is done collecting the ones she wants she right clicks and
selects something akin to "send to album"   

Thats it.  She is done.  No great expertise required.  Later, she can sort
the albums by date or when you do a search it includes album names.  

In digikam a virtual album through the predefined searches seem like it
might partly fit the bill, but it is a bit more complicated and conceptually
different:

1) Create tag "ALBUM - BLAH BLAH"
2) Find photos and add ALBUM BLAH BLAH tag.  When you have a lot of tags
this becomes harder to do as the tag list gets quite large.  However, when I
showed tags to my wife it immediately became confusing as a photo can gets
multiple tags and then all show up at once and when choosing a tag the tag
list is rather long as we have lots of tags.  This can be partly worked
around by using subtags but still not the prettiest view.     
3) Create an advanced search that looks for ALBUM BLAH BLAH
4) Save search as virtual album

Why not just select photos and click "Add to virtual album"? Also, you might
consider calling it something else instead of an Album since in Digikam
Album already has a specific purpose.  Maybe "ScrapBooks" as this is more
equivalent to scrap booking. 



--
View this message in context: http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/Coming-from-Picasa-Desktop-help-tp4690017p4690029.html
Sent from the digikam-users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.