[Kde-imaging] KIPI plugin for image processing

[Peter Wensing]

Hello,

I want to do semi-professional image processing with linux.
For this I plan to set up three directory trees, which contain my pictures:

- one (called ORIGINALS) contains my original raw images and jpg-previews, 
which are generated using dcraw. All these images are read-only.
- one (called ALBUMS) contains my albums with hand-selected and processed 
pictures - just to view them and have fun.
- and the third (kind of in between), called PROCESSING, contains pictures in 
various processing steps. Here I want to have one directory for every 
processed image (for example called PW-00001), which contains something like 
a hard link to the raw image (for example named PW-00001.cr2), a hard link to 
the generated jpg-preview (named PW-00001.jpg), a manually raw converted 
image using ufraw (PW-00001R.jpg), a denoised version of the latter (using 
NoiseNinja) (PW-00001N.jpg), a version which is further processed using 
digikam and/or gimp (PW-00001P.jpg) and a one, that is labeled with copyright 
and camera-data for publishing (PW-00001L.jpg). The pictures in the second 
directory should be hard links to the PW-?????P.jpg files in this directory.

Each of these three directory trees should be further divided into events, 
containing dates, so that the subdirectory names should look like 
2007-11-16-zoo-hannover.

I would like to develop a KIPI plugin for leading me through the processing.
If there is a new directory in the ORIGINALS tree, I want to see all 
jpg-previews from this directory. Then I want to select the interesting ones 
for further processing and press a button. This creates the directories for 
each image in the PROCESSING tree containing the hard links to the raw and 
the preview images. Now I only want to see one image for each of these 
generated directories, the other ones should be hidden. This should work like 
a virtual album, that always contains the latest processing step version of 
each image. (Of course, I would like to have buttons, which make the other 
versions and/or the not selected images from the ORIGINALS directory visible 
again.) And of course, I want to be able to click on an image and have the 
appropriate application for the next processing step (ufraw, NoiseNinja, or 
digikam/gimp) opened automatically.

Is that possible with KIPI plugins? I read a little bit about them, but I 
don't know them very well. As I understand, they read the albums and images 
from the host application. And they can add and delete images to albums. Can 
I use that feature for hiding pictures and showing only the ones, that I want 
to be shown? Can that be done completely independent of the real directory 
structure, which in my case is completely different from the album structure?

In the first step, I only would like to know, whether it can be done. 
Experimenting and figuring out how, would be the second step.

Thanks to everyone, who read my long and quite complicated text and can help 
in any way!

Peter