[KimDaBa] Re: [Kimdaba-announce] New snapshot including the date bar available

[Robert L Krawitz]

   From: "Jesper K. Pedersen" <blackie at blackie.dk>
   Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 17:40:05 +0100

   | 3) It would be nice to have an option to display 4-digit years (this
   | is a personal peeve of mine).

   well the problem is that the space is too little in the date bar to do this.

Worked fine when I did it.  Again, I use tiny fonts with a huge screen
area, so perhaps I'm a special case.

   | 5) It would also be nice to have a faster way to scroll the bar.
   Faster in what way? I wonder if you found all the ways you can scroll it.

   1) you can use the left/right arrows
   2) you can grab the focus rectangle and drag that one.
   3) you can grab the date part (the lower 50% of the datebar) and drag that.

I didn't find the last, which is the fastest way of doing it.  It's
not a standard user interface behavior (it doesn't look active, for
one).  The first two are very slow.

   | 8) Please remove the QT_MAX_IMAGE_SIZE code from both utils.cpp and
   | imageloader.cpp, per my previous email (simply check the result of
   | QImage::load() to prevent a crash).  It does somewhat work around the
   | problem, but it's not the ideal way to do it (a better way to do it is
   | to set this in the kdeglobals file).  It also makes it impossible to
   | run a binary compiled on a SUSE system on a non-SUSE system.

   Please see personal email on this issue.

My response amounted to "remove all code inside both #ifdef
QT_MAX_IMAGE_SIZE blocks" (in util.cpp and imageloader.cpp).

   | 9) At startup I get a message to search for images with incomplete
   | dates.  However, the default option for Display Images with Incomplete
   | Dates (search for images with valid date but invalid time) doesn't
   | actually select the right images to fix up.

   sure? How can you tell?

Because it selected zero images and didn't resolve the problem,
whereas the second option (displaying images with broken dates) did
find the images in question?

   It seems to me that the EXIF loading code in previous versions of
   KDE was kind of broken, so a lot of images have broken time stamps.

That wasn't the problem.  The images were scanned TIFF files
(obviously with no EXIF data).  Maybe 10 out of the 900 or so scanned
TIFF files had this problem.  The dates were all zeroed out (year,
month, and day were all zero, but the time was valid).

   |    So far KimDaBa have had no need for your images to be sorted, but
   |    the date bar works by far best if they are (Jumping to a given date
   |    will show all images from that date). KimDaBa thus have a new
   |    function to aid you in ensuring that all your images have valid
   |    dates (which might be something as simple as 1998-2001). Once you
   |    have given all your images a valid date, use the sorting function
   |    from the Images menu to sort your images.
   |
   |    Previous versions showed the thumb nails of your images in folder
   |    of 100 images per folder, but for the date bar to work, all images
   |    are now shown in one folder. The previous setup was not by design,
   |    but simply because I couldn't figure out how to avoid loading all
   |    thumb nails at once. Now, fortunately I found out, so showing
   |    10.000 thumb nails doesn't course your computer to load gigabytes
   |    of memory. Let me know if you have a very good reason for re-adding
   |    the folder view with each 100 images.
   |
   | I don't know how much I like this change, although it may simply be a
   | matter of getting used to it.  It seems to work well if I'm in a large
   | but restricted view, but not so well if I'm looking at all of my
   | (6000+) images.  However, the memory consumption is now impressively
   | low (97 MB -- times sure have changed -- is now "impressively low").

   What exactly do you mean by not-so-well?

Just that it takes a long time to scroll up and down.

   I can't see another way to enable the datebar to move around, than
   to show all images in one view - at least not another simple way.

It's not that bad of a problem, and the date bar is a big advantage.
Probably on balance the new behavior is better.  It's certainly more
convenient if I want to perform an operation on a lot of images at
once.

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net
Project lead for Gimp Print   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
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