[KPhotoAlbum] kphotoalbum questions

[Johannes Zarl]

-- It sems that I sent the reply from the wrong address the first time around.


Hi Kie,

> 1.is it possible to do a search and exclude photos with a particular
> tag (e.g. has tag A but does NOT have tag B).
> This would be very useful.

Sure. Just open the search dialog and enter "A & !B" (for your given example).


> 2. I often travel for a month or two, during which time I take a
> lot of photos. Is it possible to tag the new photos on my laptop
> and then move them to the NAS when I get back and combine the old
> set of tagged photos with this new set of tagged photos?

AFAIK this is possible and some people on the list do this. Better wait for 
someone who actually does have this use-case to answer, but the principal 
work-flow should look like this:
(Preliminary: you should use the same directory layout on your laptop and your 
home-PC.)
1) Tag the photos on your laptop
2) Select the tagged images, and use File->Export to export the tags:
Choose "Do not copy files, only generate .kim file" if you already have the 
files on your PC.
3) On your home-pc, use File->Import to import the tags.

> (It was suggested on the irc channel that I could simply copy
> the index.xml file and exif.db to the laptop and then copy the
> updated version to the NAS when I get back (assuming no updates
> to the NAS). Is this the best way?

This should work as an alternative. This method has the benefit that you can 
access your whole database on your laptop and do exif-search on the images 
that you do not physically have on your laptop. The downside is that you can 
get consistency headaches easily if you accidentally made changes to both 
databases. 

You can combine both approaches and use the export/import approach for merging 
changes back, though.


> 3. I don't always get the selection I intend when tagging
> e.g. if I type in 'art' and press enter, it will select 'Xmas party',
> I will also not be aware of this unless I check the tags.
> To make the correct selection, I need to click the box by art
> which means my hands leaving the keyboard and using the mouse.
> Is there anyway to avoid this?

You can change the way KPA matches the tags in the options menu of the 
annotation dialog: you can match tags from the line-beginning, from word 
boundaries, or anywhere. Setting this to a value that matches your preferences 
should reduce mouse-clicking overhead.

> 4. occasionally it will ask me if I want to resize the grid,
> probably when I accidentally hold the ctrl key while scrolling
> the mouse wheel.
> It warns that it will result in all thumbnails being regenerated.
> I do not want this because with over 100,000 photos it takes a very
> long time. However if I say no the photos are spready fairly wide
> across the page, e.g. on my screen 6 per row instead of 8.

This sounds like a bug. It should revert to the original grid size if you say 
no to the resize.

Cheers,
  Johannes