Automated import of camera photos

[Alex Schuster]

Hi there!

As some of you may know, I'm a Gentoo user, and I have a KDE which is 
quite well configured. But I'm setting up a PC for a lady who has _very_ 
limited PC experience. She wants to try Linux, because she became 
deprived of e-mail access by her ISP after her account started to send 
SPAM due to some Windows malware. She only uses Firefox (mainly for 
eBay), a mail client for two mail accounts, an image viewer, and she 
needs to import photos from her camera. She also likes to play two 
Windows games, Space Cadet (pinball) and some cards game.

So I installed openSUSE (12.2 I think) on her new PC. For the desktop 
environment, I chose KDE because it is so configurable. There should be 
extra large icons on the desktop for example. I can set the fonts to a 
huge size, which works fine mostly - notifications however show up with 
text lines merged into another, so the text is not readable. This 
happens when I plug in an USB camera, KDE asks if I want to open it with 
Dolphin, or if I want to import pictures with Gwenview or Digikam. Maybe 
I can tune this so only one entry appears.

Photo import is the main problem: She currently has some Windows 
application which allows to import all new images of the camera to a 
folder. I would really REALLY like to have this feature, but it does not 
seem to be possible.

When the camera is plugged in, I can choose to import images with 
Digikam. Works, with a few clicks. But when I do this again, Digikam 
wants to import all images again, not only the new ones. It is working 
fine as long as I do not close Digikam, but when I open it again, it 
will import all images. This make es it basically unusable.
I'm not sure if this also happened when I have Digikam running and 
import manually, but this involves more clicks, and is also not what I want.

Gwenview imports only the new images. Fine, but also with way to many 
clicks. The user needs to open folders named 'DCIM' and such, has to 
pick the right ones, and the dialog asks him to import 'documents', not 
'pictures' or 'photos'. You might think tis is not a big deal, but I 
fear this will make the user keep using the old Windows PC, where 
everything works as expected.

Any ideas how I could solve this? Is there any possibility to import all 
new images from a camera to a folder? I would not mind scripting if 
necessary.

Sorry, I do not know the exact version of KDE, and I do not have the PC 
here right now. Maybe this is a bug which is already fixed. I do not 
have access to my own PC right now, too, so I cannot simply check this. 
So I'm sorry for asking here, but I'm moving, and only have a Windows 
laptop with me at the moment.

Another disappointment was KMail, which I gave another try. The problem 
was that I did not know the passwords yet, and it (or rather Akonadi) 
kept asking for it, I was not even able to delete the resource because 
of the dialog which would appear over and over again.  I guess I could 
have solved this eventually, but then I decided to simply use 
Thunderbird instead.

What was great about using KDE was the possibility to configure the 
desktop. I removed all window title bar buttons except for the close 
button - minimizing an application to the panel would already be too 
complicated, don't ask :)  A double click on the title bar to maximize 
the window is okay, other stuff is too sophisticated. If she wants to 
use another application, she simply closes the one she is using. She is 
happy with this, and then so be it.
I also disabled features like maximizing windows when they are moved to 
the screen borders, or special effects happening when the mouse enters 
the screen's corners. While I personally like those features much, it's 
great that they are all optional. Thanks for leaving KDE so much 
configurable, I guess this would not be possible with Gnome.

	Wonko
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