[KPhotoAlbum] order criteria for a family photo collection

[Heinz Kohl]

Building up and maintaining my collection of rather young historical photos - 
nearly all are taken later than 1900! - I was seeking a Photoalbum and was 
finding some better, some less good, but none which was perfect for my 
issues.

KPhotoalbum seems to have the upmost manipulation potential, but some ordering 
and handling restrictions:

- the time is an ordering criterium which is giving some very partial 
ordering, and to get the best possible time ordering, more than one more 
clearly defined additional order criterium is necessary

- A main collecting criterium of me is the scan number of the photo.
  I've maintained it as part of the file name (e.g. scan 2147 could be 
grandfather-2147.jpg, WorldWar-I-Italy-2147.jpg and XMas-2147.jpg)
  It should be possible to seek and sort for this collection criterium.
  Again and again I've the problem to find photos in the same scanning 
environment (e.g. to find other scans of negatives of the same negative bag).
  Of course, negatives on the same negative stripe are from the same time 
window - but that time is often known only with a precision of +-30 years. 
The environment may give a much better estimation (e.g. here: the 3 pictures 
are all from December 1916).
  As I see it, to do that in KPhotoalbum I had to set up a list including more 
than 2000 entries, and there would be no hope to manage them (or I would part 
the number into 4 digit-criteria ...)

- Without time there could be no sorting property founded in KPhotoalbum.
I think about some free order criteria which the potential of the time, at 
least to differentiate between the (more or less) dating part and the 
ordering part of the time with the possibility to connect these very 
different roles.

- KPhotoalbum is wanting to sort all pictures belonging to time. Doing that in 
my case would set up the need to misuse the time for scan numbers, e.g. as 
days since the year 0.

- the original negatives were totally unordered.
  Its necessary to order the scanned images. With the given editing mechanisms 
this seems to be extremely inefficient and in fact nearly impossible.
  But better editing mechanisms could also be very helpful not only for my 
goal.
  As a provisorium and as a demonstration I'm planning to write a firefox 
based webpage (which might be worked out by students as a Mozilla 
application) as a help to edit my KPhotoalbum index.xml, and would be happy, 
someone would implement some idea of that - or, much better, before me! - in 
KPhotoalbum
(all information fixed to only one window using an easy click environment, 
easier copying from other description entries; a hierarchical information 
text collage; one window instead of the multiple vanishing push down menue 
windows of KPhotoimage).