[KPhotoAlbum] Thumbnail Performance & Compatibility: ImageManager vs KIO

[Johannes Zarl]

Hi Tim,

On Sunday 14 July 2013 00:09:33 Tim McCormack wrote:
> How much work would it be to extract the thumbnail management as a
> separate component for other projects to use? If feasible, I'd imagine
> this could help with the maintenance issue by making the main codebase
> less scary to newcomers as well as by putting more eyeballs on the
> extracted component (if it is picked up by other projects.)

That depends on the exact parts that you want to extract. Read-only access to 
the index file & thumbnail-files is pretty trivial. Write access would also be 
ok as long as the thumbnail generation code is left to the using project.

The thumbnail generation code is IMO pretty hard to extract into a non-KPA-
specific component.

If other projects want to use the thumbnail storage component, they'd need the 
location of the image directory though. That means either parsing 
.kphotoalbumrc or doing a second component that allows access to the KPA 
settings. Either way, this shouldn't be too much effort.

All in all, I'd be willing to help with this if there is genuine interest from 
another project, but if not I will not try to convince other projects to use 
our thumbnail handling.

  Johannes