[KPhotoAlbum] General interfacing (was Re: Configuration dialog RFE/annoyance)

[Mark Eichin]

On 3/4/06, Robert L Krawitz <rlk at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> I have yet to find a better tool for organizing photographs.  My wife
> uses iPhoto, which is dreadfully slow and doesn't really seem to offer
> much of anything that KPhotoAlbum doesn't.  KPhotoAlbum is blazingly
> fast; much of it seems to be limited by disk/filesystem performance
> more than anything else.

Indeed, I've tried to use iphoto a number of times - and usually with
each new major release, I find that it just can't handle my collection
size.   (Even if it could, I probably wouldn't *like* it because it's
not very keyboard-friendly - I run kimdaba under ratpoison, and so far
I have 3000 photos in it and it just cooks along...)

> One thing that would be handy (and probably very simple) would be to
> integrate it with PhotoPrint.  That's a Gutenprint client that one of
> our developers has put together (see
> http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/PhotoPrint/About.shtml).  Currently
> I have to export photographs to a directory and then run PhotoPrint;
> it would be very neat to have some kind of integration.

While gutenprint should probably get directly integrated (is
gutenprint isolated enough that the fact that one is GTK and the other
is KDE likely to not matter?)  it occurs to me that I should elaborate
on the strategy I used for flickr-sync, even if it isn't quite ready
for primetime:
http://www.thok.org/intranet/python/exif/index.html

The key discovery is that (1) python cElementTree is well-suited to
the flavor of XML kimdaba uses, and is very fast (2) "I want to do
this" is a valid meaning for a tag, beyond the usual "this is in this
picture" or "this picture is about this".

If I'm reviewing pictures and decide I want to put one up on flickr, I
just add "flickr" as a tag.  After saving/exiting kimdaba, I run the
tool, which parses the XML, finds all pictures tagged with flickr, and
uploads them.  Once the upload works, it adds *another* tag to the
picture, "flickd"; next time around it filters those out when looking
for things to upload.  [An alternate strategy would be to delete the
"flickr" tag but I happen to like knowing which pictures I've already
uploaded.]  While uploading, it includes all of the other tags as
well.

This strategy could be used for other programs; you could drill down
to a subset, use c-2 to mass-tag them, and then run the standalone
tool.  Alternatively, you could set up "standing orders" - for
example, I take a lot of pictures for work, including pictures of
whiteboards for-the-record; by tagging those with work + whiteboard,
currently I can manually select them and generate an album, but
ultimately I want to have an automatic tool do that.  (I haven't found
a Kimdaba "batch mode" or I'd have already done it - instead I'll
probably end up using kid templates for an album builder...  Back in
the day, I did this with some perl scripts and BINS (sautret.org) but
it had scaling issues too...)

This does rely on the index.xml format not changing much, but if it
stores the same data it probably isn't going to ever end up *too*
different.
--
_Mark_ <eichin at thok.org> <eichin at gmail.com>