[digiKam-users] concatenate/edit text playlist and import to Slideshow(not Presentation)

[Ty Mayn]

My uses of digikam 7.5 are focused entirely on tagging, sorting and
filtering for presentations on various topics in a large collection. I will
never be editing any photos like an artist-pro, but I will be displaying
some metadata as overlay on full images. I am still learning the search and
sort capabilities.
      I am not finding tools for generating LISTS of photo filenames as
output from a session of searching,selecting or filtering.  I can use
output to send selected files to collaborators (who otherwise do not need
digikam as their display tool)
   Looking  through menus and tools , I do find an icon of a diskette in
the search module that raised my hope for saving an accomplished search
into a textfile list.  But instead it offers to save it as an "virtual"
album.
     I suppose that would be a list of sorts ,but it is not a textfile
listing filenames  and path locations for retrieval,copy, or input back to
some display engine.
    Where is there a tool to translate the "virtual album" into a list ?
A simple text list can also be manually edited to concatenate  filenames
that are obtained by manual search which is not derived from digikam search
    If I develop such a growing list for a presentation then I do see one
place to input a textfile for display in the Presentation tool.   However
Presentations are underpowered for my purpose because Presentation does not
have a menu for adding important metadata overlays.  Slideshow does have
that power of overlays and can overlay all the tags or labels that
Thumbnails can show.

      So Slideshow has the best display for overlaid metadata, but is there
any undocumented method for feeding it a text file list for display?
      Tagging and search seems useful for collecting parts of a total
playlist for slideshow, but  the "virtual album" concept does not seem to
be a file list and is not a method of concatenation to grow a list. There
is no way to save  a playlist.
      Ideally a playlist has a manual sort tool which can act on visible
thumbnails. I was expecting to do such sorting manually outside of digikam,
but I would like to feed such a sorted playlist back to digikam as an input
to slideshow with the overlay metadata captured from an undisturbed
database.
    The only action allowed on a selection seems to be to duplicate each
file  to a special folder for the purpose of feeding only  Slideshow   Such
duplicate files can add confusion to the master collections aside from the
overhead.
     Non programmer hacking thought:  Is the "virtual album" from a search
sitting in the digikam4 database easily parsed like a list ? (its probably
a numeric list of  file index numbers, but if it is plain text  filenames,
DB Browser could  be means to substitute an edited playlist with the proper
format??
     Has anyone seen such goals or solutions for past users?  with a
master archive of this maillist I would be searching for "playlist" or
"filelist"  " input"  "slideshow" "virtual album"
thanks
Ty
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