Recursive folders : NO (was [KimDaBa] Newbie Q: Auto-assign Location/Persons on import?)

[Jean-Michel FAYARD]

On Fri, 1 Oct 2004 00:31:52 -0500, Michael Sternberg
<starbuzz at comcast.net> wrote:
> On Thursday 30 September 2004 01:25, Jean-Michel FAYARD wrote:
> >[the folder browser] displays only folders which contain at least one
> >picture in the current scope.
> >I've thought to implement recursive folders [...]
> >as a "Member group" of folder, but for a reason I didn't
> >remember, I've felt it would add more bloat that usefulness for the
> >user. If you convince me I was wrong, this may change in the future.
> 
> Well, let me try:  Showing the folders hierarchically would mirror the way the
> user put the images in.  More importantly, though, it would allow broad
> querying -- e.g., in my case, I'd like to select all "Paderborn" images, or
> all "Germany" images, *without* having to construct a Boolean expression from
> all the sub-folders in the Query window.
> 
> Further, displaying all folders hierarchically, perhaps even non-image
> ones ("0 Images" would appear in the browser), and aggregating their
> contents would mirror the way music players work, e.g. xmms or the
> Archos portables:  If you click on a directory, ALL music files below
> will be enqued and played.
> 
> Therefore, I reckon that pretty-near-native hierarchical folder
> handling would be a significant usability improvement.

What you gave me before is the best case scenario :
  Germany
  Germany/Paderborn
  Germany/Paderborn/Quellgebiet
  Germany/Paderborn/Markt
  Germany/Paderborn/Uni
 
But now, if you select the keyword [+++] and you see
  Germany
  Germany/Paderborn
  Germany/Paderborn/Quellgebiet
  USA
  USA/Washington
  USA/Washington/Pennsylvania_Avenue
  France
  France/Aix_En_Provence
  France/Aix_En_Prove/Jules_Ferry

it´s not quite as nice :(


But my killer reason to not do it is the KIPI plugins : most will be
written by people that do not use Kimdaba, and they will expect that
it works like in their favorite app. That is they will do something
like what I´ve seen in the cdarchiving plugin :
   prompt> cd imagecollection::path()
   prompt> images=$( ls *jpg *png)
This will work in their favorite app where 1 album == 1 folder, but
will be broken in Kimdaba where this is in general false BUT a nice
side effect for the "browse by folder" thing, is that BY DEFAULT (most
people don´t change the defaults, right ?), this will work in KimDaBa.
But if I implement recursive folders, this might be broken again (ie
the second line should be something like
  prompt> images=$( find . -name "*jpg" -or -name "*png" )
)


So, I will not do it.