[Kde-imaging] About ImagesGallery plugin

[Aurelien Gateau]

Le Mercredi 8 Février 2006 00:31, Achim Bohnet a écrit :
> > > 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.
>
> One powerful generator as a start would be good ;)

The only problem is that it introduce a dependency on another program. Maybe 
the solution is to provide a way to quickly download it, like the 
Simpleviewer plugin does. My criteria for an external generator are:
- Easy to install, that is:
 - Use a widespread script language like Python or Perl (no binary
   incompatibilities)
 - Can run from unpacked dir (there should be no need to install it before
   running it)
 - No extra dependencies, if need be, we can scale the images ourself to avoid
   depending on an imaging library
- Free software
- Produce static HTML
- Can make use of metainfo like image titles
- Support themes
- i18n support
- Provide a way to display progress of the generation process
- Anything else?

I'm going to have a look at the available generators to see if one suits our 
needs. If one of you know such a generator, let me know.

> > 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.
>
> Obtaining meta data is also a problem for kipi plugins themself.  This
> needs to be address in API V2 of kipi IMHO.

In the current version of the API, KIPI plugins can already access some 
metadata like the image title, comment and the album list. Maybe we need more 
metadata, though.

Aurélien