[KPhotoAlbum] Original & modified images -> tell us how do you work with them?

[Risto H. Kurppa]

On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Andreas Neustifter <astifter at gmx.at> wrote:

Hi Andy, I appreciate your thoughts a lot, I feel this could lead to
something new, keep it up :)

>> Looks to me that everyone (who have access to the code) come up with
>> their own hack to match their workflow making KPA a bit of a mess with
>> no real vision of what it is and should become.
>
> I guess that's also one of the strengths of KPA, that it does not tie you to
> a certain workflow. I think this is good because everyone likes to use
> different tools for post processing/editing/touchups/RAW conversion/... KPA
> (in my humble opinion) adheres to the UNIX principle ("Do one thing and do
> it good") quite well as so far as its core strength is still fast tagging
> and fast retrieval of pictures
>
> That said the UNIX-Philosophy is quite hard to translate to KPA because the
> Input/Output is not a simple text-stream (as with many UNIXy tools) but its
> a whole set of picture files. Additionally in every workflow there are
> pictures going out (because they are found) are manipulated outside _and
> then go in_ as "old but also new because edited"-pictures again. This is
> where the UNIX-I/O-Philosophy breaks down.
> As for going out, there are:

> *) the HTML albums (pure export)
> *) copy-paste
> *) open in another program
> *) copy-open in another program
>
> Maybe the second point of "Incoming" and the last two points of "Outgoing"
> could be merged into a single consistent feature:
>
> *) Divide the external programs, that a file can be opened in, into two
> categories: viewers (non editing) and editors.
>
> *) When an image is opened in a viewer, just open it.
>
> *) When an image is opened in an editor, make a copy (file.ext ->
> file_1.ext) and open the copy in the editor.
>
> (The last two points would relieve the user of the decision if he wants to
> edit, and thus use copy-open or if he just wants to view...)
>
> *) If the file differs after the editor is closed (does this mean the editor
> would have to be a child of KPA?) keep the copy, stack it on top of the
> original, copy tags. (Maybe copy EXIF data automagically?)
>
> *) If the file does not differ, delete the copy.

Letting KPA delete files automatically makes me feel a bit uncomfortable..

But however, I think this breaks when working on RAW files:
I have a RAW file, I open it (KPA creates a copy and opens it), export
a .jpg or .tiff in the same dir - then what? KPA will delete the
copied RAW file, leaving the raw recipe behind - but the next time it
will not open the raw recipe (see ufraw for example). I'm not sure,
this has to be thought throughly.

Anyone else, some ideas?


r


-- 
| risto h. kurppa
| risto at kurppa dot fi
| http://risto.kurppa.fi