[Kde-imaging] Selecting images for plugins

[Jesper K. Pedersen]

This discussion seems to want my attention soon, so let me take an hour of 
from work now, to think carefully about it.
(Lots of talk in the text below, please read to the end before answering, lot 
of the text is just to make you better understand my reasoning)

Lets just summarize Aureliens suggestion:
in each plugin have a browser for selecting what to print, the browser would 
look like this:

<Aureliens suggestion as Jesper understands it>
- current selection
- album1
- album2
...
with the current album being selected.
</Aureliens suggestion as Jesper understands it>

I'm not really thrilled about this, I really like the current setup, but it 
seems like neither Renchi nor Aurelien likes that, so I have a few suggestion 
for changes, and to make every one happy I give in this time.

<Read-only-section-no-need-to-comment>
Here is my problem with this suggestion:
KimDaBa do not have the concept of albums at all, therefore when a plugin asks 
for an album, I have to make something up.

For current album I return the current scope (which is those images that you 
currently have browsed to, e.g. "all images of Jesper with beers".

As I don't have the concept for current album, I dont have the concept for all 
albums naturally, and it is pretty hard to extend my definition above from 
current album, to give a definition that spells sum( all possible current 
albums ) == all albums

The above definition is the basis of Aureliens suggestion in the first place, 
namely to show all albums side by side, and open the current one.

Now how do I implement all albums?
I implement this by using say the "Keywords" to make sub albums, those if you 
look at http://dotfile.adsl.dk/dump/img1.jpg I would have albums labeled "No 
Keywords", "Anne Helene's ..." "beers" etc.
That way my users browse to the set of images he is interested in, and can 
from there select "sub albums".
</Read-only-section-no-need-to-comment>

So from the above it should be clear that current album is not one of the 
shown albums. Therefore it is not possible to select the current album for 
me.

How about this change:
1) add a new KIPI::Feature saying AllAlbumsSumUpCurrentAlbum
The idea behind that name is that the following is true for you, but not for 
me: Sum( possible-current-album) == all-albums.
That is all-albums is a sum of all your albums.

2) develop a widget looking like the one outlined above, and make that into a 
util function that plugins need to call, and put in their layout. I suggest 
that all plugins have a tab page called selection with that widget.

3) by default the current album (and we still have to figure out how to find 
which album is current) is selected unless the feature 
AllAlbumsSumUpCurrentAlbum is not present.
If it is not present (kimdaba mode ;-) the selection will be selected, and if 
no selecetion exists, all albums will be selected.

How about that for a compromise?

Ad2: We may want to make the tab widget (erhh icons 
on-side-for-each-tab-widget - I dont know what that is called) the widget 
users can get rather than just the selection widget.
I wonder if we somehow can force the plugins to use such a dialog to all look 
the same to the user.

Cheers
Jesper.