[Kde-imaging] Re: [Digikam-devel] KExif updates

[Renchi Raju]

On Sat, 5 Jun 2004, Ralf Hoelzer wrote:

> KExif now handles EXIF writing of comments and the orientation tag. This is
> done without going through Libexif. Libexif replaces the entire EXIF
> structure and throws out all tags it doesn't know about. Writing it directly
> makes sure no information is lost. I have tested this with a bunch of
> different sample images from exif.org, which use different byte orders, etc.
> Let me know if anyone finds a problem, but I am fairly confident this is save
> now.
>
> I implemented setting the exif orientation tag from the popup menu in the item
> view. This is useful if the image has been rotated but the exif tag has not
> been adjusted. Otherwise some image viewers will autorotate the image, even
> though it has already been rotated. Thumbnails are now autorotated according
> to the EXIF tag.
>
> My next todo is to implement resetting the EXIF orientation tag in the
> Jpeglossless KIPI plugin. The problem here is that the plugins cannot access
> the KExif library. I would recommend that we move Libkexif into
> kdeextragear-libs-1. That way, the plugins can use it to write comments
> (Batch commenting plugin) and the orientation tag (jpeglossless and maybe
> others as well). Does anybody see a problem with this?

sounds good to me. the libkexif should be moved to the kipi library,
because it seems the most obvious place to have it. i'm ccing this mail to
the kde-imaging list too, so that the developers there also can comment
on it.

if we move the libkexif to kipi, then we will need to add conditional
compiling for the kexif specific features in digikam (depending on whether
kipi is available in the system or not). at some point when kipi is
stable, kipi will become a requirement for digikam.

it might also make sense to do testing on as many images as possible, so
that we don't run into problems.

renchi