External metadata service support in Digikam?

[Jens Benecke]

Hello,

how do I integrate an external service into Digikam?
I want to use Clarifai to do some automatic tagging (www.clarifai.com) 
experiments since my tagging requirements take *way* too much time. 
(Actually, I think this would be a great feature for Digikam by default 
- automated AI based tagging ... ;) )

Basically I'm looking for a way to select some images and say "Send 
these images to Clarifai via API and save the returned image tags to the 
image metadata".

Is this possible at all without resorting to C++ and hacking the Digikam 
source itself?

I know I can create a batch operation with a custom shell script but 
this shell script expects a *different* image as the output - while I 
just want to update the metadata.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Jens