[KPhotoAlbum] kphotoalbum method of storing Tags, description

[Joe]

On 01/30/2012 04:36 PM, Andreas wrote:
> Hi All!
>
> On 30 January 2012 07:22, Miika Turkia<miika.turkia at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 2:24 AM, Karl Schmidt<karl at xtronics.com>  wrote:
>>> On 01/29/2012 12:50 AM, Miika Turkia wrote:
>>>
>>> It might not be trivial to write the code to add annotation to a picture,
>>> BUT I am absolutely certain it can be done without corrupting the image.
>>> <time passes>    I just did it with digikam and verified that it is in the
>>> file with exifprobe - all the camera data is intact.
>> There is no question whether it can be done or not. We used to have
>> that feature and might have it also in the future. It just needs some
>> developer to pick up the task and code it up (any volunteers?).
>> However, internally KPA will still use own "database" as reading tags
>> from one file is many times faster than scraping the tags from tens of
>> thousands of files and many of our users prefer not touching the
>> original images at all.
> Some toughts:
>
> I see no way of getting rid of the XML database for several reasons,
> not the least of which are speed, reliability and well working and
> tested code.
>
> EXIF data is usually read only and contains all the settings and
> meta-data that the camera records when taking a picture. Usually
> editors should strive to preserve this data, maybe modifying the "last
> edited" date, I see no issues for KPA there.
>
> IPCT and XMP are used to store other information (places, people, ...)
> and both can be embedded in the files themselves.
>
> I guess KPA could either continuously write XMP and IPCT to the
> pictures as well as to the XML-DB (less likely IMHO) or there could be
> a "export" dialog including a big fat "backup your files
> first"-warning that writes the current tags to the images.
>
> (Just as a side note: It would be best to architect those exports as
> "plugins" with a defined interface so that they can be implemented
> separately with the help of the appropriate libraries. But that maybe
> talking to much into the future...)
>
> Importing from IPTC and XMP should be done on detecting new images or
> changes to present images.
>
> What would be quick, fast and easy would be a python script that just
> exports from XML-DB to XMP and IPTC, btw.
>
> Andi
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I'm sure plugins would be better.  I can define arbitrary tags in kpa 
and I'd need some sort of translate table to map as many as possible to 
whatever tags/format the other photo organizer package expects to see.  
That has nothing to do with kpa core functionality.

It would be a lot easier to deal with without worrying if something in 
the code might break something else inside kpa.  In fact, that's a 
pretty good argument for a standalone converter - as long as there was a 
reasonable way to select pictures to export and then locate the relevant 
metadata from the database.