Coming from Picasa Desktop - help

[Carsten Fuchs]

Hi all,

Am 2016-10-18 um 22:24 schrieb bjnovick:
> I have tried using the tag method, and also the Picasa way, Lightroom,
> Acdsee, PhotoDirector, Shotwell, etc way. (each of these have other reasons
> why they don't work for my family)  Let me ask - if tags and file storage
> structure work, why do so many DAM/Photo Organizing programs have concepts
> like Virtual Albums/Scrapbooks/PhotoGroups/Events?

I (too) am a former Picasa user and a new digiKam user, and so far get 
along with tags very well, especially thanks to digiKam's features like 
"Timeline" in the left sidebar and others. Combining tags and metadata 
with these search and filter features seems to cover the described use 
cases (as far as I understood them) for virtual albums well.

Please keep in mind that I'm still new to digiKam and maybe not enough 
of a power user to have explored and experienced the limits of what 
digiKam can do. Also, my albums are named like "yyyy/yyyy-mm-dd mother's 
birthday", which helps me with organization a lot. And I have not yet 
explored saved searches enough to really know how much they can act as 
virtual albums (although it seems to me that virtual albums should be 
implemented with saved searches).

Alas, what I really like about digiKam's albums is their straight 
relationship to folders on disk. There is never any confusion about 
this, and it helps a lot with working with the images outside of 
digiKam, even if for nothing else but backup purposes.

It's probably purely subjective, but what I would really really not like 
about a virtual albums feature was if they weakened and mixed with the 
album's clear concept, introducing confusion where currently there is none.

Maybe it's just a matter of naming (i.e. it should *not* be "virtual 
albums", as has already been suggested) and a matter of presentation. 
But in a software as feature rich as digiKam, I think that avoiding 
feature overload (or maybe, user overload ;-) ) is an important factor.

Best regards,
Carsten