[KPhotoAlbum] Couple of queries & suggestions

[jedd]

 Howdi,

 Apologies up front if these are repeats - I kind of dropped
 off the list for a few months.  Will try to keep 'em brief, so
 don't mistake it as terseness.  Think of 'em as discussion points.

 Suggestions

 Maintenance | Re-read meta data -- the dialog box that pops up
 should remember the radio boxes that were set/clear the last
 time.  I'm doing a lot of image manipulations on annotated images,
 so often want to re-read EXIF date and orientation data .. but don't
 want to overwrite descriptions etc.

 Main / front screen - Search - there should be a way of retaining
 the last search, or last couple of searches, as it's cumbersome to
 re-type a sequence of tags, especially if some are negated.

 When modifying tags for multiple images, there's no hint that you
 may be about to overwrite the description field - if one or more of
 those images has a description set.  Even if all the images have
 the same description, it doesn't let you know.  Some grey-out
 thing or just a notice saying some images have a description field
 that's already populated?

 Alternatively . . .
 Wondering about the feasibility / practicality of having multiple
 description fields for each picture.  Probably the two - one that
 is specific to that one picture, the other would be a group
 description, unrelated to any particular tag that's attached.  The
 grouping of photos in a 'set' often has disparate tags anyway,
 and that's what gets changed when you do multi-image editing.


 Questions 

 XML file - is there something 'funky' about the way we record
 data in there?  I'm using php's simple_xml_load() function to pull
 the file in, and I'm losing line-breaks in the description fields.
 I suspect it's PHP, but just want to check.

 For a given file, there's no way that the md5sum should change for
 that file if there wasn't any change *inside* the file, right?  I think
 I'm seeing some md5sum recalculations going on - which is hard on
 the CPU, but the big problem is it blows my web front end out of
 the water when md5sum's change.  I'm suspicious of my file
 system (encfs - encrypted loopback-ish FS) and wonder if that's
 causing problems, as it's been Weird with other things.  But just
 to clarify, if the date stamp of a file or directory location of a file
 changes, that shouldn't affect the md5sum, right?


 cheers,
 Jedd.