[Kde-imaging] About ImagesGallery plugin

[Aurelien Gateau]

Le Mardi 7 Février 2006 20:32, Achim Bohnet a écrit :
> I'm still not sure if I like the the config like page(s).
> A wizard that displays the 4 pages after each other is
> a better concept IMHO.  Current design needs of course less
> clicks _if_ one is knows that the chosen values in the other
> pages are correct.

I agree, a design similar to the print wizard would be nicer. I can do this.

> Before putting too _much_ efford in imagesgallery additions,
> time is IMHO better spend to find a way to interact with one (several?) of
> the existing gallery programs.  Many of the missing features, e.g., CSS,
> are already implemented there.  Generating an input/config file for a tool
> and fire it up from kipi, is much easier to maintain than developing a full
> featured gallery plugin.  Maybe gallery upstream author even takes
> over/helps to maintain such a plugin (I'm dreaming ;).

This would be nice, but then we should support several of them, otherwise we 
would tie the plugin to one gallery generator. We should also provide a very 
simple gallery generator, so that users do not need to install an additional 
gallery.

> Mhmm, a general (sort of a base class plugin) that take list of files
> and start app xy with the files in arguments may also be helpful to
> incorporate e.g., external slideview programs,  fire up kommander
> scripts wrapper around imagemagick or other tools.

Well... this was one of my original ideas for KIPI: creating standalone 
programs instead of plugins. This way everyone can use them, not only KIPI 
enabled applications.

There is a problem with this design though: obtaining application specific 
metadata. A standalone program would not be able to access image comments and 
tags from Digikam or KPhotoAlbum for example.

I thought about a possible solution for this, but I don't know if it's 
feasible at all: provide a way for standalone programs to access image 
metadata through a DCOP service: Instead of implementing the current KIPI 
interface, KIPI apps would implement a DCOP service which would provide the 
metadata information. A tool like a gallery generation program could then 
query the service for album list, image metadata...

Aurélien