[KimDaBa] Export a Kimdaba collection to a gmail account ?

[Jean-Michel FAYARD]

Hello to all

Here is an excellent example of use of KimDaBa's HTML export :
http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~upaxe/Albums/LinuxTag/index-800x600.html
a) I export a few dizains of picture about a certain event
b) which I selected myself
c) I make it available to everybody (well those who care ;-)
d) the navigation is very simple (linear) which is a very good point.

Now I'm thinking about a total different use case :
1) I want to make my whole colllection available
2) my visitors select themselves what they want to see
3) I need to restrict the access
(for example, my cousine is teacher. I don't want that her students
type her name in google and hop ! see immediatly pictures with she)
4) Because my whole collection is available, my visitors need an 
efficient sort and search mechanisms
5) I want my friends to be able to leave comments

There is already this solution : http://wersdoerfer.com/
but it's only for the happy few who have a generous (in harddrive
space) web hosting
with mysql and so on, we need to reinvent the wheel for 3) and 5), ...

So here comes my dumb idea : everyone can open a gmail account
specially created for hosting his pictures ( see :
http://isnoop.net/gmail ) and a kipi plugin send for each picture a
mail to this gmail address
      From: <my.gmail.account at gmail.com>
      Date: <Date of the picture>
      Subject : Name of the folder
      
      Jesper ; Ann Helen
      Chicago
      Keyword 1 ; Keyword 2 ; Keyword 3

      Attached file : the picture compressed in jpeg and reduced to 640x480 


For criteria 1) : 
everybody can now have for free a 2 Go storage, which means I can
store a 20 GO collection
                           (assuming a 10:1) collection
For 2) : 
- gmail will group pictures in a folder (also with the same subject)
in one thread
-  it displays very nicely a thumbnail of your attached picture, so
it's fast to browse
and you can still access the original attached file
For 3) : OK and I can use the "I forget my password" question to
obsolete my old password
if I don't trust my old friend anymore
For 4)
- the thread function facilite the navigation  
- gmail has a powerful search function. Just type "Ann Helen" and it
will find the mails containing
this comment
- you can apply labels to further sort them
For 5)
- they just have reply with a mail to the thread, with text, pictures or both
they can "star" a picture if they find it beautiful, ...

Some additional advantages : the interface is translated in many
languages, and if a friend
sends to me a mail with his holiday pictures, I just have to forward
it to the gmail account.


Badly enough I have no personal PC (and no much free time anyway) in
the next months to test it, but I sent a few emails manually to see
how it could look like.  Log on on  http://gmail.google.com/ with

Login: photos.jmfayard           Password: kimdaba

(PS: well it's not the format I proposed with one image==one picture
(too boring to do
it manually) and they are no Persons/Locations/Keywords so the search
function is not that good, but you get the idea)


What do you think of this idea ?