[KPhotoAlbum] IPTC and EXIF, kphotoalbum, digikam

[Eivind Kjorstad]

Thomas Hummel wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 12:27:25PM +0100, Eivind Kjorstad wrote:

>> Not in Kphotoalbum, no. Jesper has stated publicly that he is against 
>> it, and there's good reasons to keep with the policy.

> Which reasons ? indexing read-only media ? prevent image-file
> corruption ?  other ?

All of those and more :-) Ok, seriously, here's some of my reasons. Note 
that I am only a kphotoalbum fan and so my word is only mine, Jesper has 
no obligation to agree with me.

1) Never opening image-files in write-modus means we can be very very 
sure that we never EVER corrupt image-files.

2) Some people have their image-files on read-only media, or on media 
mounted read-only, for precisely the reason that they explicitly want to 
be certain no coruption takes place.

3) People using digital signatures to be certain digital pictures are 
"pristine" are screwed if we mess with metadata in the files themselves.

4) There's no universally agreed-upon standard for exactly how to store 
certain information. This is improving rapidly, but we're still not 
quite there, far as I know anyway.

5) We need a database anyway, so storing elsewhere is double work, and 
leads to questions of the sort, what to do if the two are out of synch 
etc. (this ain't a fundamental reason, only a practical concern)

> What about portability of the work produced by Kphotoalbum ? What do
> you think ?

I'm not personally concerned. The Kphotoalbum-data are stored in a very 
easily parsable xml-file. Push comes to shove, Jesper gets run over by a 
bus, and nobody picks up the ball, the data are there, and it's 
reasonably easy to combine an xml-parser with something that can write 
whatever format your new picture-cataloguer wants to read.

I think making this easier, (not the bus part) for example by adding 
plugins that export (whole or parts of) your image-collection in a 
format understood by other programs would be a nice idea. I'm also 
certain nobody would oppose that assuming anyone could be bothered to do it.


	Eivind Kjørstad