[KimDaBa] Feature requests

[Nicolas M. Thiery]

	Dear Kimdaba developers,

Since 4 years that I own a digital camera I have been playing with
quite a bunch of image viewers/organizers for Linux, and never found
anything adapted to what I wanted. And then one month ago I discovered
Kimdaba 1. After one evening of playing with it, I became convinced
that this was the perfect fit for me, but for a few missing things
... which were fixed in Kimdaba 2 that I downloaded the following day :-)
Even some of my suggestions below are already outdated.

Great piece of software. Thanks so much for your work!

Here are a few suggestions of features that would make it even cooler.
I have browsed quickly through the mailing list and the TODO list, so
I hope I am not duplicating a standard feature request; please forgive
me if I do. Many of the suggestions aim at making the interface even
more intuitive for newcomers (when I let friends of mine browse
through my pictures).

Image viewer:

 - When no selection is active, pgup/pgdn in the viewer work as if all
   pictures were selected.

 - When the image is zoomed in, the arrows scroll progressively the
   view around (as in, say, gqview).

Thumbnails navigator:

 - Directly display the thumbnails in the selection window
   (done in recent snapshots?)

 - Shift-click on a pictures adds it to the current selection
   (allowing for selections that do not simply consist of a range of
   pictures)

 - When going back with Alt-Left Arrow, the cursor is repositioned at
   its former position.

 - The "current image"/cursor are kept synchronized between the
   thumbnails navigator, the viewer, and the keyword editor (C-1). In
   particular, when hitting C-I while several images are selected,
   display first the image on which the cursor currently is.

 - When all the images in the current view are in the same directory:
    - Allow for copying files from konqueror (and other kde applications)
      by drag and drop
    - In HTML exporter, propose the current directory as default value
      for the destination folder.

Keyword editor:

 - C-I displays the image with the viewer

 - When multiple pictures are edited with Ctrl-2, display their
   thumbnails (or, for simplicity, just the first one) in the image
   window.


Support for videos (.avi, ...):

 - The thumbnail represents the first image of the video, possibly
   with a specific logo to indicate that this is a video. Here is a
   script that I used from time to time (and which can certainly be
   improved) for building such thumbnails:

	mplayer -vo jpeg -frames 1 -vf scale=160:120 bla.avi
	mv 00000001.jpg bla.jpg
	rm 00000002.jpg

 - Clicking on it possibly calls an external viewer (say mplayer), or
   calls the standard kde video plugin.

 - Keywords, and other information are dealt with as for pictures

 - What to do with rotation information?
   mplayer could be called with the appropriate options to rotate
   the video on the fly:
	mplayer -fs -vop rotate=1 bla.avi

Misc:

 - Finding duplicates *using the existing checksums* already in
   kimdaba (should be much faster than the external module).

The following can most likely now be done with Kimdaba.pm:

 - Batch property edition (add a keyword to all files matching ...)

 - Export back Kimdaba's image information to the original image files:
    - Rotate "physically" the images, and clear the EXIF rotation
      information to be coherent
    - Update date/time information in the EXIF
    - Update the description
    - Possibly include the keywords in the description?
   This will help for the interoperability with other image software

Just my 2 cents, and again many thanks for all your work!

Best regards,
						Nicolas
-- 
Nicolas M. Thiéry "Isil" <nthiery at users.sf.net>
http://www.lapcs.univ-lyon1.fr/~nthiery/