[KimDaBa] Easy to use FOSS RAW converter, KimDaBa RAW feature ideas

[Neilen Marais]

Hi Jesper

On Thu, 2005-11-24 at 22:24 -0500, Jesper K. Pedersen wrote:
> On Thursday 24 November 2005 22:19, Robert L Krawitz wrote:
> |    From: "Jesper K. Pedersen" <blackie at blackie.dk>
> |    Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 20:10:42 -0500
> |

> KimDaBa is an image database, not an image manipulation application, so I'm 
> delegating those tasks to other applications. I'd be happy to work together 
> with any open source application that can do this. To my knowledge there 
> however, isn't any real user friendly ones for linux.

Have you had a look at UFRaw yet?
http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/index.html

I've spent a bit of time playing with it, and it's certainly a couple of
notches above what went before, both in terms of userfriendliness and
image quality. While it is based on the dcraw code, it also integrates
with littleCMS to give easy to use colour management. Before UFRaw I
could never get accurate RAW converted colours out of my Nikon D70
(though I didn't try very hard).

What is nice about it, is that it can run as both a stand-alone
application, a GIMP plugin and as a batch converter. It lets you save
image settings to a file, so that you can apply them to other RAW files.

Anyway, with regards to what kind of RAW features I would like...

I like to consider the RAW file my digital negative. What I do ATM is
shoot in RAW + low quality JPEG. I catalogue only the jpeg files with
KimDaBa, which works fine most of the time. But when I do a custom
conversion of some RAW, I end up with a new image that does not know who
its parent is. Currenly I haven't done too many RAW conversions, but
it's something I plan to spend some time on in the future.

In the future I want to shoot only raw, and make my image downloading
script (or KimDaBa could even do this by calling the converter) do a 1/2
size (i.e. 1/4 the no of pixels) conversion for thumbnailing purposes.

I'd actually like KimDaBa to "know" that the RAW file is the original,
and keep track of all it's "decendants." This would avoid the need to
re-enter image info for a newly converted image. One may also want to
ask KimDaBa to hide all decendants, so your view does not get clutterd
with close duplicates.  

It would also be nice if KimDaBa could keep track of the RAW conversion
settings used to do a given conversion. UFRaw, and probably other
programs, can write the settings to a file that KimDaBa could then
somehow track.

Another nice feature is KimDaBa interfacing somewhat automatically with
the raw converter. E.g. if I click on a thumbnail of a RAW, to do a
raw-conversion. KimDaBa could then tell the RAW converter what filename
to save to (eg. to avoid overwiting another conversion by accident), and
could also save the raw conversion settings.

Oh, and another feature that doesn't have much to do with RAW
conversion. It would be very nice if one could see EXIF info in the
KimDaBa image viewer. While storing EXIF info in the database may make
it too big, it should not be to hard to read EXIF info from the file
when displaying?

Actually, it would nice nice to have some of the EXIF technical specs in
the database (e.g. shutterspeed, aperature, ISO, focal length) since I
occasionally want to search on those criteria. Though perhaps I wouldn't
like to have a category for each. Perhaps EXIF search would have to be
specialcased somehow if it were implemented

Anyway, thanks for the great work on KimDaBa so far. It's always
exciting to see just how much KimDaBa improves with each release!

Regards
Neilen

P.S. I wanted to donate once, but Paypal can't be used by South
Africans. Is there some other way to make a donation?

> Cheers
> Jesper.
>