[KPhotoAlbum] order criteria for a family photo collection

[Eugene Nine]

On Tuesday 06 February 2007 11:40, Heinz Kohl wrote:

>
> I'd be happy with it, if the human interface would be as good as the idea
> and the conception. But I'd need at least 3 totally different installations
> of KPhotoalbum - one for the tiny historical archive (a 2050 pictures,
> index file, now 1 MB estimated to grow to 10MB), one for my very modest
> analog album waiting for scan (a 30 000 pictures) and some for different
> series of digital photos (there's less than no benefit to mix inbetween
> macro photo archives, family archives, art collections and landscape
> archives). Sorry, even a very tiny 2000 photo album is setting up some
> efficiency problem - but more than that severe organisatorial and handling
> problems devoted to a theoretically sufficient interrogation management
> with no respect to an optimised man-machine interaction beginning at the
> stage of (sub-)window management.
> Take a look to professional CAD programs: every handling step is evaluated,
> the trained CAD engineer isn't even looking for a button - he's feeling
> where to go with the mouse having eyes only for his construction just like
> a car driver, who's never busy in seeking the actual place of brake or
> steering wheel - he's just looking to the ongoing landscape photo show.
> _______________________________________________

Thats why I always tell everyone, never waste your time trying to rename the 
pictures.  Think of your drive and the picture metadata as a database.  You 
have various types of data fields to place data and if you try to mix 
multiple types of data in one field then you make more work for yourself in 
the long run when you needs to search/filter/sort on that data.  Its the same 
with IT data, I run into the issue now.  We have an inventory system which I 
can export a list of my servers to MS Excel and look at the data.  They 
decided that the servers application and role within that application cuold 
be combined so when I want to sort or filter by either I have to figure out 
some complex expression to plug in the filter or sort dialog in MS Excel.  If 
they kept the two data types separate then it would it would be a single 
mouse click.  I apply the same to my picture "database", keep the fields 
simple and single typed.  Dates belong in the date field, descriptions in the 
description field, file name in the file name field.  When you try to combine 
the dates and descriptions then you make searching and sorting that much more 
difficult because you have to figure out some way to split the data again.  
Then when you try to rename the files you find that most file managers don't 
properly sort date coded filenames or most simple picture viewers don't sort 
in the same order.  So by keeping the filenames super simple you don't run 
into as many issues.  Also filenames are limited on characters so you may put 
in a character that will work on one OS but not on another, I've BTDT, sent 
named pictures to someone running a less sophisticated OS like MS Windows and 
they couldn't view a couple of them.  Now I just tell them to view the image 
description column in their Windows Explorer rather than trying to explain 
how to decode a naming convention.
Then you can also use a command line tool like exiftool and script out a bunch 
of fields at once like this:
exiftool -software='xscanimage (sane-frontends) 1.0.13' *.jpg
exiftool -Model='Scanjet 4300c' *.jpg
exiftool -Make='Hewlett-Packard' *.jpg
exiftool -createdate='2007:02:01 14:00:00' *.jpg
exiftool -imagedescription="Curtis at One year old" *.jpg

Imagine trying to fit all that in a filename and making it MS WIndows 
compatible "xscnmg1_0_13_scjt4300hp20070201140000_curtis_at_one_year_old.jpg 
which is pretty unreadable.   (and thats not all, I've started tagging some 
with GPS coordinates hoping day when GPS's come in all cameras and programs 
like KPA can map them out).