[KPhotoAlbum] image sorting and moving

[jedd]

 Hi Pascal,

 Cool name, btw.  :)

On Wednesday 30 December 2009 16:56:22 Pascal A. Niklaus wrote:
> - Is it possible to display the images sorted by file name? If not, this 
> would be a great option.

 From the info you provided in the follow-up, I can suggest an
 alternative method of getting to the same place.

 So, from this:

> The case I came along was that I had files from a holiday that were 
> already batch-renamed by topic, e.g. national_park_a_1234, 
> person_a_1234, location_c_1234, topic_d_3456 etc, where the 4-digit-part 
> is the number in the digital camera file name (these once were 
> subdirectories). These topical groups do not correspond to the exif 
> date/time...

 In this situation, what I'd do is make a directory for each of the
 locations based on name (programmatically, or if it's only a handful
 I'd do them manually).  Move each of the files into their specific
 sub-directories.  Start KPA and let it find the new files - it will
 create the md5sums of each of these, and take a note of where
 they live in the file system.

 Browse down using the 'folder' (directory) view.  Select all the
 files in each dir, ctrl-2 tag them with the location.  Repeat for
 the rest of the dirs.

 KPA | Save

 KPA | Quit

 Relocate the files back to where you want them to be.

 Start KPA - it will notice the files have relocated, based on their
 md5 checksums.  Just for your own happiness you could then check
 the tags on a few of them to make sure.


 This approach - or variations on same - may answer your last question
 in that email to Jesper.  Yes, as you observe, KPA tries very hard to
 not 'mess with your data' - so we tend to rely on that.  The kipi
 plugins *will* mess with your data, as will the delete button (etc)
 so you want to have a full copy - rsync'd or similar, somewhere,
 while you're playing around with this stuff.

 FWIW I tend to do all my photo editing (primarily cropping and
 making panoramas) after I load my photos in, and before I start
 KPA.  I find KPA an excellent tool for tagging and so on, but I
 still use geeqie (nee gqview) as my preferred tool for flipping
 through, deleting, rotating, zooming in, comparing quality etc.
 For each directory ( .../pictures/camera-model/yyyy/yyyymmdd/)
 I create a 'modified' directory for crops and touch-ups, leaving
 the original in place.  exif data is a direct copy of the original
 of course.

 I also create a 'panoramas' sub-directory, and in there my filenames
 are of the form 'yyyymmdd - xxx-yyy - location, description' where
 xxx and yyy are the first and last image in the set of photos that
 make up the panorama.  Because I create PNG's from my source JPG's,
 then do touch-ups in gimp, and then save out as JPG, my workflow
 then includes a script that copies the exifdata from the last actual
 photo that made the pano, and then adds 5 seconds to the exif
 datestamp - then touches the file with the exif date information.

 (Yes, I'm a bit particular :)

 Point being, there's a bunch of stuff that you may just find it
 easier to do outside of KPA, and once you've got everything
 'just so' you can start KPA and let it find all your additions.

> I also have a lot of scanned slides which do not have a sensible 
> date/time stamp (I just assign them a single date by event), so that 
> ordering by time does not make sense (but by filename would because I 
> scanned them in sensible order or have given them sensible names).

 Oh, with this .. I've hit a similar problem with a bunch of *very*
 old slides and APS prints that I scanned a while back.  

 I think with some scripts around exiftools you could take the date
 (assuming you have an ISO8601-ish date format in your filename)
 and insert it into the exif data.

 If you are just using incremental numbers in your filenames, you can
 still algorithmically generate incrementing exif date fields, it would
 just require a tad more effort (but not much more).

 Oh, and happy new year :)

 Jedd.