[KimDaBa] Suggestions for improvement

[Jesper K. Pedersen]

Ricky <ricky at linuxbourg.ch> writes:

| Hello Jesper, hello list,
| 
| First of all, thanks for this nice piece of software. It's really proven to
| be useful. After using it for more than two months, here's my modest
| contribution in form of suggestions for improvement (or call it RFE?)
| 
| 
| 1) Now when I want to describe an image or a group of images, I need to do
| these actions:
| 
|    1 - select the image(s)
|    2 - right click and select properties for all images or one at a time
|        also possible with shortcut
|    3 - Select the corresponding categories, persons, places etc...
|    4 - Close the dialog
| 
| I think KimDaBa would be much more usable if we got rid of the dialog and
| would perform the above action in the following way:
| 
|    1 - select the image(s)
|    2 - Have a sidebar with the categories, persons, places etc... and
|        select them.
|    3 - maybe have an "apply" button at the bottom of the sidebar, so that
|        one could have a chance to "cancel" some changes.
I've heard this suggestion quite a few times now ;-)
The problem is either the screen space it would take or the amount of work
involved, let me elaborate:
Someone suggested a side bar like yours, where people could drag an image
onto say the name Jesper to say that Jesper is on that image - that will
indeed not work with 192 persons in the database as I do have.
The other alternative (which I understand you suggest) is to more or less
build all of the config window  into the thumbnail view.
That would just take up to much screen space.

One thing I could consider was to make it possible to have the config
window shown all the time, for those lucky bastards having more than one
monitor (I personally have lots of screen space with three monitors ;-)

That would make the windows not jump up and down all the time.
I'm not sure hoe much you would gain by that tho.

| Benefit: 2 or 3 actions instead of 4. That's a huge benefit, given the
| number of times one has to perform these actions. Having the sidebar
| available when the picture is open in a viewer (not full screen) would be
| another benefit, since sometimes it's hard to recognize the people on the
| photo, and then one has to switch between the dialog and the viewer, which
| is also rather cumbersome.
Take the image preview from the config window, drag it out to be a separate
window, and resize it to 1600x1200, that should do it, shouldn't it?

| 2) Probably this has been asked several times, but it's really complicating
| matters if you cannot rename the actual files. I know, the intended effect
| is: you download your photos and there they are, they don't move, they are
| never renamed, all you need is KimDaBa for managing them. Unfortunately,
| this often doesn't match with reality, since one sometimes renames the
| photos, moves them to other directories and so on. Since KimDaBa knows
| where a file is stored, it should be possible to tell from within Kimdaba:
| create a new directory (on the filesystem) and move the selected images to
| that place. (same for renaming etc...)
this is already possible with KimDaBa 1.1

| 3) After finding an image, I sometimes want to open the original file with
| Gimp or jump to the folder where it is stored, so that I can send these
| photos to friends. I don't want to send smaller photos or make a gallery,
| just send the original ones. I've seen that part of this has been addressed
| in 1.1 (I will download and compile it in a moment) but I think all of this
| is not possible yet.
Yes part of it is possible, the rest might become possible, dunno.

Cheers
Jesper.