[KPhotoAlbum] Import from Picasa

[Johannes Zarl]

hi,

On Monday 30 June 2014 16:55:05 Constantin Orăsan wrote:
> I am currently working on a script which imports information about people
> embedded by other programs in the photo (in this case Picasa) and updates
> index.xml accordingly. I think the structure of index.xml is fairly self
> explanatory, but are there any issues I should be aware of when I modify
> the XML externally?

Obviously you should stop KPA before changing the index.xml, but I think you 
already know that ;-)

> I plan to:
> - add a new keyword "external_info", so I guess I need to make sure it
> appears in the list of keywords. For ID can I used the first available ID?

Yes.

> - add the name to the list of Persons, if the name does not appear. Can I
> use the first available ID?

Again, yes. IDs are generated the same way for all categories. "Persons" is 
not any different then "keywords" (or any other category). 

> - update the information in the <options> tag with the relevant persons and
> the external_info keyword.

That should work.

> For the moment the script will work only with version="3" uncompressed.
> Does it make sense?

As long as you don't alter tags that you don't care about, version 4 
uncompressed should not make any difference:

The only difference between version 3 and 4 is that the 
"images.image.options.option.value" tag has an additional attribute "area" in 
version 4. As long as you keep that area tag where it appears, you can support 
both version 3 and 4.

Regarding uncompressed vs. compressed format: This really depends on your use-
case. You can also start with uncompressed only and add support for the 
compressed format later on.

> Should I do anything special except make sure that I
> have a backup of the index.xml file?

Backing up the index.xml should be sufficient in your case. You can of course 
use the kpa-backup.sh script if you want.


> Is there a more detailed information about the database than
> https://github.com/jzarl/kphotoalbum/blob/master/documentation/database-layo
> ut.md I am trying to understand the differences between the different
> versions.

No, there's nothing else that I'm aware of. Thanks for the feedback, though. 
I'll try highlight the differences in that writeup a little bit...

Cheers,
  Johannes