digiKam file browsing mode / using as image browser

Dear digiKam community,

I have followed this mailing list for a while without posting, until  
now ... you guys seem to be a friendly and helpful bunch. I hope we  
get results here. ;-)

First: digiKam is a wonderful photo management program as it is.  
Probably 99% of all users will never get to it's limitations and I'm  
quite happy that everybody - including me - can use it. Please don't  
take any offense, since I mean no harm with my limited abilities to  
express myself in english. ;-)

My inquiry is a bit like a feature request, which rather belongs into  
the bug tracker. But I think my issue could require a little bit of  
community discussion, I'm posting here hoping that many people,  
especially the regulars and developers, offer their ideas and  
opinions, since the first know the program fairly well and the latter  
put a lot of hard work into the program.

Here's the main thing:
My parents own a little business which handles masonry work. Two years  
ago all these machines were operated with Windows 2000 and had AcdSee  
5 to view and print photos stored on an old NT4 Server. Somehow I  
managed to change all machines to kubuntu, which basically is a bless.
But acdsee did the job as image browser very, very well. One can  
easily browse a directory tree, move photos around by cut'n'paste and  
rotate images and such things. Additionally version 5 included a  
simple print tool which easily allows to print 4, 6, 8 or 20  
thumbnails on one page (this was later removed in favor of photoslate,  
I think).
AcdSee is no longer an option with ubuntu, since it does not work with  
wine and managing virtual machines with virtualbox is way to  
complicated for "just browsing images", I think.

There are quite a few tools, which are able to show images and  
thumbnails. They even come with the kubuntu-desktop meta-package.
This includes:

  - konqueror: It's fast. But that's it. It is complicated to navigate  
when used in the picture browsing mode. There is no tool that allows  
to print multiple images on one pice of paper. Additionally it can't  
do easy photo manipulation stuff like rotating, adjusting brightness  
and contrast, etc.

  - Gwenview: It's also fast, but it lacks the cut'n'paste method to  
move pictures around and for some reason printing takes ages with our  
printer. Also there isn't a printing wizard for printing multiple  
images on one page. (My bug report/feature request for the cut'n'paste  
thing hasn't been touched for over a year. I'm afaraid it probably  
won't be addressed in the future.)

  - Dolphin: Hasn't got the filesystem tree on the left side and  
therefore is not an option.

  - digiKam: It's really, really fast due to it's database backed  
thumbnail store. You can move pictures around with cut'n'paste. The  
printing assistand is lovely and is featurerich. I don't use all the  
features this thing got! :-D

    The only problem with digiKam is: Over the past ~8 years we  
collected quite a number of photos. The last time I checked it were  
around 16GB. These photos are all stored on a NFS server (replaced the  
NT4 server). These 16GB are not concentrated in on directory, but  
lying around everywhere in the directory structure (eg. together  
with .odts corresponding to a specific job).
    So it's necessary to set the whole /nfs/server/data directory tree  
as digiKams image store. For me this means digiKam will go over 60,000  
documents each time it starts up. This takes a long time, especially  
with NFS. Furthermore it's not possible to use the database  
corresponding to the /nfs/server/data-structure on more than one  
computer at a time.

Until now I did not have a better idea than to integrate a file-
browsing-mode into digiKam. This could be accessible on the left side  
of the window (like media, home and / in konqueror). It should allow  
to browse to any directory accessible to the user, show thumbnails  
there and allow to rotate, print and such stuff.
This would certainly make it easyer to use kubuntu for us. From my  
point of view it seems this also could be true for many other users  
switching from Windows with AcdSee or comparable image management tools.

What do you think?
Have I gotten something horribly wrong?
Have you any ideas how I can cope with the situation without writing a  
single line of code?
- I really would appreciate to hear from you.

Thank you that you took the time to read all this.

Bye,
  juergen
_______________________________________________
Digikam-users mailing list
[hidden email]
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users

[Gilles Caulier-4]

2008/11/24 Jürgen Scholz <[hidden email]>

Dear digiKam community,

I have followed this mailing list for a while without posting, until
now ... you guys seem to be a friendly and helpful bunch. I hope we
get results here. ;-)

First: digiKam is a wonderful photo management program as it is.
Probably 99% of all users will never get to it's limitations and I'm
quite happy that everybody - including me - can use it. Please don't
take any offense, since I mean no harm with my limited abilities to
express myself in english. ;-)

My inquiry is a bit like a feature request, which rather belongs into
the bug tracker. But I think my issue could require a little bit of
community discussion, I'm posting here hoping that many people,
especially the regulars and developers, offer their ideas and
opinions, since the first know the program fairly well and the latter
put a lot of hard work into the program.

Here's the main thing:
My parents own a little business which handles masonry work. Two years
ago all these machines were operated with Windows 2000 and had AcdSee
5 to view and print photos stored on an old NT4 Server. Somehow I
managed to change all machines to kubuntu, which basically is a bless.
But acdsee did the job as image browser very, very well. One can
easily browse a directory tree, move photos around by cut'n'paste and
rotate images and such things. Additionally version 5 included a
simple print tool which easily allows to print 4, 6, 8 or 20
thumbnails on one page (this was later removed in favor of photoslate,
I think).
AcdSee is no longer an option with ubuntu, since it does not work with
wine and managing virtual machines with virtualbox is way to
complicated for "just browsing images", I think.

There are quite a few tools, which are able to show images and
thumbnails. They even come with the kubuntu-desktop meta-package.
This includes:

 - konqueror: It's fast. But that's it. It is complicated to navigate
when used in the picture browsing mode. There is no tool that allows
to print multiple images on one pice of paper. Additionally it can't
do easy photo manipulation stuff like rotating, adjusting brightness
and contrast, etc.

 - Gwenview: It's also fast, but it lacks the cut'n'paste method to
move pictures around and for some reason printing takes ages with our
printer. Also there isn't a printing wizard for printing multiple
images on one page. (My bug report/feature request for the cut'n'paste
thing hasn't been touched for over a year. I'm afaraid it probably
won't be addressed in the future.)

 - Dolphin: Hasn't got the filesystem tree on the left side and
therefore is not an option.

 - digiKam: It's really, really fast due to it's database backed
thumbnail store. You can move pictures around with cut'n'paste. The
printing assistand is lovely and is featurerich. I don't use all the
features this thing got! :-D

   The only problem with digiKam is: Over the past ~8 years we
collected quite a number of photos. The last time I checked it were
around 16GB. These photos are all stored on a NFS server (replaced the
NT4 server). These 16GB are not concentrated in on directory, but
lying around everywhere in the directory structure (eg. together
with .odts corresponding to a specific job).
   So it's necessary to set the whole /nfs/server/data directory tree
as digiKams image store. For me this means digiKam will go over 60,000
documents each time it starts up. This takes a long time, especially
with NFS. Furthermore it's not possible to use the database
corresponding to the /nfs/server/data-structure on more than one
computer at a time.

Until now I did not have a better idea than to integrate a file-
browsing-mode into digiKam. This could be accessible on the left side
of the window (like media, home and / in konqueror). It should allow
to browse to any directory accessible to the user, show thumbnails
there and allow to rotate, print and such stuff.
This would certainly make it easyer to use kubuntu for us. From my
point of view it seems this also could be true for many other users
switching from Windows with AcdSee or comparable image management tools.

Thanks for your feedback. it's very instructive...

What do you mean by file-browsing mode exactly ?

In digiKam for KDE4, you can set more than one root album, including removable and networks repositories. Each one are add to album tree view on the left side of album GUI. This is not enough ?

Best
Gilles Caulier
 

What do you think?
Have I gotten something horribly wrong?
Have you any ideas how I can cope with the situation without writing a
single line of code?
- I really would appreciate to hear from you.

Thank you that you took the time to read all this.

Bye,
 juergen
_______________________________________________
Digikam-users mailing list
[hidden email]
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users

_______________________________________________
Digikam-users mailing list
[hidden email]
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users

On Monday 24 November 2008 00:42:29 Jürgen Scholz wrote:
>   - Dolphin: Hasn't got the filesystem tree on the left side and
> therefore is not an option.

I will never tell you NOT to use digiKam (I would be stupid :-)), but dolphin
can view a tree on the left panel. Just press F7 or go to the menu
(View->Panels->Tree).

After you used dolphin and came to the conclusion that digiKam is the app to
go (:-)), you can add multiple root albums in there as Gilles mentioned
earlier.

Andi
_______________________________________________
Digikam-users mailing list
[hidden email]
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users

Hello!

> What do you mean by file-browsing mode exactly ?
Oh, I totally forgot to describe this; I imagine something like:
  - Zero configuration
  - The directory-tree on the left side of the window starts at "/"
  - There is no need to store the thumbnails in a/the database
  - because of that nothing has to be scanned at startup <- this is  
important
  - one can move images around with cut'n'paste
  - basic image editing capabilities (rotate, contrast, brightness)  
are available
  - printing wizard is available

Sure I don't know if the architecture of digiKam would allow such a  
mode.


> In digiKam for KDE4, you can set more than one root album, including  
> removable and networks repositories. Each one are add to album tree  
> view on the left side of album GUI. This is not enough ?
I haven't tried KDE4 until now. But I don't think that I want multiple  
albums. The problem really is (we're using KDE3.5 with kubuntu 8.04)  
that digiKam takes ages to start up and continously asks to delete  
pictures from the database which have been moved around with another  
program or on another computer. - It's just a small thing, but the  
people here tend to dislike that.

Personally I would be able to cope with that. But I can understand  
that it's a little annoying to wait three minutes after you  
accidentially closed digiKam. That's not digiKams fault, since the NFS  
filesystem is a bit slow. ;-) But a database-less mode would fix that.

I hope I could make myself more clear.

Bye,
  juergen

_______________________________________________
Digikam-users mailing list
[hidden email]
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users

Hello!

> I will never tell you NOT to use digiKam (I would be stupid :-)),  
> but dolphin
> can view a tree on the left panel. Just press F7 or go to the menu
> (View->Panels->Tree).
Oh! KDE has just so many buttons. ;-) I didn't notice that. But  
dolphin still lacks the wonderful printing wizard digiKam got.

> After you used dolphin and came to the conclusion that digiKam is  
> the app to
> go (:-)), you can add multiple root albums in there as Gilles  
> mentioned
> earlier.
I tried to explain this in my reply to Gilles a few minutes ago. The  
scanning of the files and the questions about orphaned files is what I  
don't like.

Bye!
  juergen


_______________________________________________
Digikam-users mailing list
[hidden email]
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users

Actually the print wizard should be a KIPI plugin, this means that gwenview
has the same printing dialog, too.

Andi

On Monday 24 November 2008 11:48:15 Jürgen Scholz wrote:

> Hello!
>
> > I will never tell you NOT to use digiKam (I would be stupid :-)),
> > but dolphin
> > can view a tree on the left panel. Just press F7 or go to the menu
> > (View->Panels->Tree).
>
> Oh! KDE has just so many buttons. ;-) I didn't notice that. But
> dolphin still lacks the wonderful printing wizard digiKam got.
>
> > After you used dolphin and came to the conclusion that digiKam is
> > the app to
> > go (:-)), you can add multiple root albums in there as Gilles
> > mentioned
> > earlier.
>
> I tried to explain this in my reply to Gilles a few minutes ago. The
> scanning of the files and the questions about orphaned files is what I
> don't like.
>
> Bye!
>   juergen
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Digikam-users mailing list
> [hidden email]
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users

_______________________________________________
Digikam-users mailing list
[hidden email]
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users

Hello!

> If you would like (or have) to stick to 0.9.4 (or the upcoming 0.9.5):
> Another option (not sure if this would make sense with your mix of
> images/documents) is to
> create a bunch of symbolic links to ~/Pictures
> (or whereever you will put your main digikam directory),
> Such that it will look like
>  ~/Pictures/Job1_Pictures
>  ~/Pictures/Job2_Pictures
>  ...
> where each of them is a symbolic link to the place where
> you have the pictures themselves.
> To gain any benefit from this requires to separate
> your pictures into a subfolder for each Job.
> Also note, that I haven't tested something like the above .... ;-)

I'd like to plan to change to KDE4, but since quite a bit got changed  
there I'd like to wait a while before I upgrade. People annoy me if  
buttons get changed. ;-)

The method you suggest could make the initial scan faster, but the  
whole system would be much harder to use than. One has to create these  
links - and people will have to understand that files show up in two  
places (that cost me quite some time with the 3 people there ... ;-))  
and when a file is misplaced one would have to browse around with  
konqueror or something.

In the end this doesn't sound like a good idea for average bureau  
users. ;-)

Thank you for your reply and ideas! Bye!
  juergen
_______________________________________________
Digikam-users mailing list
[hidden email]
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users

[Sveinn í Felli]

Hi, just my humble impression;
>>  ...
>> where each of them is a symbolic link to the place where
>> you have the pictures themselves.
>> To gain any benefit from this requires to separate
>> your pictures into a subfolder for each Job.
>> Also note, that I haven't tested something like the above .... ;-)
> I'd like to plan to change to KDE4, but since quite a bit got changed  
> there I'd like to wait a while before I upgrade. People annoy me if  
> buttons get changed. ;-)
Try to move an ikon just a little bit on the desktop... :)

Seriously, I don't like the desktop widgets or the general
look/feel of KDE4, so I stick to KDE3.5x. But in my OpenSuse
installation I can have the underlying KDE4 libraries and
apps, running them mostly without big problems. Only hickups
I've experienced is when quiting some of the KDE4 apps, it
is eventually more related to the system being a 64bit.

So maybe you can run Digikam 0.10 in an otherwise KDE3.5
environment?

>
> The method you suggest could make the initial scan faster, but the  
> whole system would be much harder to use than. One has to create these  
> links - and people will have to understand that files show up in two  
> places (that cost me quite some time with the 3 people there ... ;-))  
> and when a file is misplaced one would have to browse around with  
> konqueror or something.
>
> In the end this doesn't sound like a good idea for average bureau  
> users. ;-)
>

Sounds you could be fast approaching the limits of direct
filemanager-based user-interaction scheme, most growing
businesses do in the end.

Cheers

Sveinn í Felli

_______________________________________________
Digikam-users mailing list
[hidden email]
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users

Hello!

> Try to move an ikon just a little bit on the desktop... :)
;-)

> I've experienced is when quiting some of the KDE4 apps, it
> is eventually more related to the system being a 64bit.
I just checked the package reporisotry - there is no newer version  
than 0.9.4. Currently I don't see that my situation would improve that  
much by upgrading to 0.10, because I would have to compile this from  
source. But I hope I will be able to check it out in Virtualbox to  
take a look at it.

> Sounds you could be fast approaching the limits of direct
> filemanager-based user-interaction scheme, most growing
> businesses do in the end.
Not really. All documents ever produced on a computer since 1996 are  
stored in this tree. The documents that are that old are mostly  
DOS .txt files, but they are still there.
Because my dad thinks quite a bit when he does something the tree is  
organized in a practical well and handles the documents and  
corresponding photos very well. I don't think we have to switch to  
something else in the near future. A reason for this is that the users  
are very well trained which files go where and stuff.
The problem with that tree is: Over 10 years ago it was not designed  
with digikam in mind. ;-)

Thanks,
  juergen
_______________________________________________
Digikam-users mailing list
[hidden email]
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users

Hello!

> Actually the print wizard should be a KIPI plugin, this means that  
> gwenview
> has the same printing dialog, too.
Thank you for your hint. Is that true for all versions or just for the  
one shipped with KDE4?
Currently I'm not at home - I'll check this out later this afternoon.

Thanks,
  juergen
_______________________________________________
Digikam-users mailing list
[hidden email]
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users

This is also true for KDE3...
In gwenview you might find it in Plugins->Images->Print or something like
that.

Andi

On Monday 24 November 2008 13:45:17 Jürgen Scholz wrote:

> Hello!
>
> > Actually the print wizard should be a KIPI plugin, this means that
> > gwenview
> > has the same printing dialog, too.
>
> Thank you for your hint. Is that true for all versions or just for the
> one shipped with KDE4?
> Currently I'm not at home - I'll check this out later this afternoon.
>
> Thanks,
>   juergen
> _______________________________________________
> Digikam-users mailing list
> [hidden email]
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users

_______________________________________________
Digikam-users mailing list
[hidden email]
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users

Dnia Monday 24 November 2008, Gilles Caulier napisał:
> Thanks for your feedback. it's very instructive...
>
> What do you mean by file-browsing mode exactly ?

I'd like file-browsing mode too so I will describe how I'd like it to
be:

On the left is panel with regular tree like in Konqueror, Dolphin or any
other file manager. In main window are shown files which digiKam can
show - images[1]. Those files aren't in database, you can open them in
IE, edit, simple corrections. There are few questions I am not sure how
they could be solved:

- how to treat metadata; Tags are disabled or directly written to images
  as IPTC tags - is it possible without database as backend? The same
  question about Comments.
- adding to collection; The most obvious way is menu action - "Add this
  directory as Collection." In directories tree, directories already in
  collection should be marked appropriately and of course dragging there
  images from "Album" view will copy/move files from current directory
  to the directory in collection and add files to database.
  There could be also menu action for individual items: "Move images to
  collection". After this user would be presented with dialog asking
  for: a) Root album where images should be added  or create new and b)
  Should files be copied or moved. This could be somewhat merged with
  current import dialog.

> In digiKam for KDE4, you can set more than one root album, including
> removable and networks repositories. Each one are add to album tree view
> on the left side of album GUI. This is not enough ?

Not exactly: adding new directories to collection or images isn't
straight. Possibility to use well known browser view could lower
barrier.

digiKam is absolutely great when importing files from cameras but has
usability problems with management of photos acquired from non-camera
sources.

m.

_______________________________________________
Digikam-users mailing list
[hidden email]
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users

Hello!

> This is also true for KDE3...
> In gwenview you might find it in Plugins->Images->Print or something  
> like
> that.
You are absolutely right. The printing assistent seems to be  
available. Oddly the actual print job will hang and thus there is no  
actual printout, but maybe I run into a glitch or something with my  
test.

Now i'm still missing the cut'n'paste option. ;-)

Thank you for your tip!

bye
  juergen
_______________________________________________
Digikam-users mailing list
[hidden email]
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users