[KimDaBa] Canon RAW support

[Robert L Krawitz]

   Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2005 17:35:29 -0700
   From: Jody Harris <havoc at harrisdev.com>

   Before I started using KimDaBa with my 10D, and before I started
   shooting RAW, I had started keeping a copy of my full-res image
   tree in 600x400 thumbnails.  I had done this to make browsing
   faster.  When I started using KimDaBa, I just pointed it at the
   "thumbnail" tree, and never looked back.  When Bibble came along, I
   was glad I had done this.  I had to rewrite my cfcard dumping
   program to convert the CRWs to the JPG thumbnails (and I started
   making 800x532 thumbnails).

   I've actually been quite happy with this system.  Even when I have
   to "re-dump" thumbnails from Bibble to get good color, the system
   seems to pay off.  Of course, I've been using KimDaBa for a while,
   so I'm heavily vested in it (5700+ images).

   On the other hand, Jesper is currently working on general RAW
   support.  It may take him a while to get broad support out.  I
   still think I prefer to use the smaller images for management, and
   treat the full-res/RAW images as "digital negatives," so I don't
   mind having to "reach in the drawer" to pull them from the
   "originals" directory when I want to use them.

As of the latest snapshot, Kimdaba supports Canon .crw files.  Rather
than use dcraw, it extracts the embedded JPEG file.  I suspect that
.cr2 files have a very similar format to .crw.

My previous workflow was to generate JPEG files from the RAW files
(full size on my main system and half size on my laptop) with dcraw
(my heavily hacked version of dcraw, which IMHO does much better color
and tone than the base version) via my card extraction script.

   Jens wrote:
   > Hi, I was just made aware of the existence of KimDaBa. Up to now,
   > I have been using Windows for my photo processing because of the
   > lack of support thru Linux. Now, with Bibble, I am almost to the
   > point of shutting down my windows box for good. The one thing I
   > am still missing was a way to catalog my pictures. I had
   > attempted to run IMatch under Wine for cataloging but had little
   > success. Now, with KimDaBa, indexing of photos seems to be in
   > reach.  I set up a sample database but I find out that RAW files
   > do not seem to be supported. I am wondering if Raw support
   > (specifically Canon 20D .cr2 files) has been brought up before
   > and if there has been any mention of if/when this might be
   > possible.  I currently archive all my pictures in RAW format with
   > IMatch under windows..

I really have to stop hacking Kimdaba and dcraw for a while, since
it's taking time away from Gutenprint (aka Gimp-Print 5).

-- 
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."
--Eric Crampton