[digiKam-users] Printing images. Do we need a "Print project view"?

[Gilles Caulier]

Hi Jens,

Your improvements proposal sound logic and perfectly doable on the
Print Creator plugin.

Please fill a new new wish on bugzilla. Check on other existing files
to see if some points do not exists already, and explain well all
improvements to introduce on the tool. If you have screenshots or
Mockup, it will be better.

We will be able to assign later this king of task to a future student.
Thanks in advance

Gilles Caulier

Le dim. 28 juin 2020 à 23:09, Jens Benecke
<jens-digikam at spamfreemail.de> a écrit :
>
> Hi all,
>
> I am using Digikam to manage about 20 years of photos, ~250GB altogether. Until 2015, iPhoto was my main photo managing app, but this has changed when Apple moved to Photos which was too restrictive (in the beginning) for me. So I ported my whole library to Digikam. And most of my daily workflow has become better, especially the performance and stability (certain pre-releases excluded ;-) ).
>
> But one thing I am REALLY sorely missing is the ability to not just create, but EDIT and MANAGE sets of images for printing.
> There is the "Print Creator" but it's a one way street: you can select images and feed it to the print creator, change the order and the layout, but you can't SAVE this configuration, clone and modify it slightly, and reload it later.
> Also, custom layouts and layout exceptions (e.g. use space for two images for a panoramic photo) are not possible.
>
> iPhoto had this feature set almost done in perfection:
> The normal photo organization was in "Events" (this is "Albums" in Digikam and folders on the disk).
> But when you create an "Album" in iPhoto (let's call it a "Project" here, to avoid confusion) it was different:
>
> At first sight it looked like a normal album. But -
> It had no physical content. It had just links to existing photos.
> It had its own internal sort order, grouping definition and additional internal photo descriptions.
> Editing photos in such a Project (for printing) would only be valid inside this project.
> The Project included a selected print or display template which would arrange the photos on a print sheet, inside a calendar, or whatever.
>
> The templates were readily layouted single- or multipage documents (e.g. calendars) which had placeholders for photos, which allowed you to zoom, pan, rotate and crop the images. After filling in all placeholers, the template could be printed. Not all images inside a Project needed to be included in the finished template. Some templates had options for one large or multiple smaller photos on a page.
>
> Depending on the template, this would allow us to make using our images much more comfortable. And I think Digikam already contains much of the technology required for this feature set. We just need to add some UI interactions.
>
> What do you think? Should we add this new dimension to Digikam?
> I think this could open up a whole new world of export and design templates and more active use for your photos.
> Especially non-technical users could contribute these templates (maybe we can even use some format that's easily editable by non-techies).
>
> if this sounds like something Digikam should be able to do, I can write a draft specification of what I think needs to be done.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> --
> Regards, Jens