[Kde-imaging] gwenview, digikam, keywords and metadata

[Kristian Rink]

Hi Aurélien;

and first off, thanks a bunch for your feedback on that, greatly 
appreciated. :)

Am 23.11.2012 09:36, schrieb Aurélien Gâteau:
> I personally do not use keywords a lot, I used to in the past but have been
> lacking the time and dedication to set them up.

I see. Actually, I also just started using both keywords and starring / 
rating of images earlier in this year. So far, I kept my images sorted 
in folders named by date (2012-01-02), which I still do, and simply 
copied out images to other folders for special purposes.

Eventually, however, I got a bit tired of spending a lot of time copying 
images and keeping them in temporary folders for tasks such as "select 
the 100 _very best_ and the 500 _best_ images from a vacation collection 
for a presentation" or "picking 12 or 52 images out of several hundreds 
taken last year for a monthly / weekly calendar for the next year". For 
these purposes, keywords and ratings to me seems to be by far the best 
solution. However, up to now, two things kept me from really using it:

(a) I so far didn't find FOSS image management application in which 
adding keywords to images is easier than copying out image files 
anywhere. Especially I don't want to manually set up a structure or 
hierarchy of keywords in advance - instead I make excessive use of 
"temporary" short-lived keywords for certain purposes, just like 
"cal13candidate" for said calendar scenario. They don't even need to be 
hierarchical, all I need is a way of adding many keywords to many images 
quickly and some support for finding keywords I already used before 
without navigating much UI. gwenviews "keywords" dialog so far is 
absolutely perfect for that.

(b) I always was sceptical towards metadata storage approaches limited 
to applications or hosts. Then and now I often do sort images using 
laptop or netbook and then do processing back home on my desktop. 
gwenview and nepomuk are at least neat for working with the same 
keywords in a consistent way through most of the KDE applications 
including (important) file manager, basically leaving that 
"keep-these-keywords-and-ratings-in-EXIF-too" the last missing piece. ;)

> Making Gwenview save keywords
> to both files and Nepomuk is a common feature request, though, so I am probably
> going to look at this soon.

Do you think something like this might be possible using kipi and 
Python? Being into semantic web things semi-professionally these days, I 
surely am curious to give the nepomuk API a shot yet my C++ skills are 
rather limited, so at the moment I wonder whether crafting a quick 
script to traverse an image store, use nepomuk to retrieve data for each 
image found and use some EXIF library to write these back would be worth 
working on (or, for that matter, possible to be done)?

Cheers, thanks and all the best!
Kristian