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

[Jesper K. Pedersen]

On Saturday 26 November 2005 17:22, Neilen Marais wrote:
| 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
Now I have, it does indeed look good. Unfortunately it doesn't preserve the 
EXIF tags.

| 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.
| 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.
This is indeed what I'll try to aim at, someone else send a rather good 
discussion on this on the mailing list yesterday. I'd still have to figure 
out what is realistic to get done, and still userfriendly enough.

| 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.
Actually there already is a plugin for dcraw doing something like this, but 
I'd have to revisit the whole raw usage, now I finallu have raw files myself.

| 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 I spent all weekend implementing that, stay tuned, I'll send another 
email on that :-)

| 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
Yes, that is one think I'm still considering. It would be cool if you could 
search for EXIF info just like you could search for persons.

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

| 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?
You may do a direct bank transfer, I'll send you my bank details in a private 
email.

On http://ktown.kde.org/kimdaba/support.htm you may now see what your donation 
goes to :-)

Thanks
jesper.