[digiKam-users] Thumbnails are in Progessive Graphics File (PGF)

[Striper]

Although I understand your arguments and reasoning, I do not fully agree with
you. PGF may be the best technical solution for storing thumbnails (or any
graphic image for that matter), it's definitely not the best solution from
an interoperability standpoint. The simple fact that Google expands its
search results for "PGF" with hits on "PDF", means that this format is not
widely used nor supported. Except for the C++ implementation on SourceForge
(libPGF), there is not a single library or utility to be found that can
decode or encode this format. In other words, unless you are developing in
C++, it's useless.

There are countless examples of inferior technology that became the standard
over a superior technology (Betamax vs VHS is a classic). For techies like
myself, that hurts, but it is a fact of life that we have to live with.

The great thing about open source is that everybody can use it the way they
want to. Digikam is a great product and I love it, but using this kind of
exotic formats hampers the "openness", in my opinion. Would anybody really
notice the difference in performance or quality when the thumbnails are
stored as JPG or PNG? Would a few extra bytes really matter when we are
already storing gigabytes of RAW and JPG images?

FYI, I got to this thread because I was looking for a way to connect a nice
looking web frontend (not Piwigo!) to my Digikam library. Most of the
solutions out there require my photos to be duplicated to their data
structure and try to extract metadata and thumbnails on their own. Wouldn't
it be great if other software can simply tap into a Digikam database and use
the wealth of information that is in there? While that may still work for
most of the data, thumbnails are apparently out of the picture (pun
intended).

Thanks and best regards, Barry



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