jkt's blog

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KPhotoAlbum Development Sprint: Part Two
2008-09-04

Image Stacking

As Henner writes, we've managed to add a new feature that some users were requesting for quite a long time -- now there's that thingy for marking several images as "belonging together".

Imagine you've taken a group photo of bunch of your friends at a pub. You weren't exactly sober, so perhaps some of these are shaky, out-of-focus or otherwise imperfect. You weren't drunk as a lord, though, so there's one of them which is pretty good. Now you don't want to erase all the other pictures, but you don't want to see them by default, either. So what you do now is to make an Image Stack of all of them and select which are bad and which one is the best one. This feature might be useful for various variants of images decoded from one RAW file or for images stitched to one big panorama as well.

It's far from complete yet (the GUI part still sucks and you can't select your order of preference, either), but it's a good start and it got done pretty fast.

Lets look at an example stack with a picture of Gunvald (Jesper's dog) on the beach. The default view in the thumbnail view shows only the first picture:
collapsed stack view … expanding to
expanded stack view

Please read Henner's post as well and let us know what you think about this feature.

Digikam

Shortly after my last post, I got a bunch of mails from our users. It's great to hear that people are interested in our work, so many thanks to all the readers! Please keep the comments going. Anyway, the most frequent question was interoperability with Digikam.

At first, I'd like to mention that I'm on a KPhotoAlbum Development Sprint. Nobody of us over here is hacking on Digikam. It surely is a great piece of software, but we don't use it ourselves. That's why I have to disappoint one reader of this blog -- nope, I can't blog about new features in Digikam, sorry. But be sure to check out the KDE Planet form time to time, their development team is blogging every now and then.

Now the interoperability thingy -- we have a nice file describing what the problems are. Looking at the document, I'm afraid that both applications are using quite different approach to tagging -- in Digikam, tags are (I haven't check the Digikam sources, nor am I using it, so this might be actually wrong) apparently in a flat namespace, while in KPhotoAlbum, we use a hierarchy (a tree) of tags for features like "pictures of Anna should be recognized as pictures containing anyone of my friends as well". This is certainly not a showstopper, but quite an important issue nonetheless.

However, please don't get disappointed too early. The question is -- why should we somehow prefer interoperability with Digikam over, say, XnView? There's a lot of users out there who are using different applications on different operating systems, and we'd like to do our best to be interoperable with all of them. At the same time, we certainly aren't willing to be held back by lack of features in other applications. Therefore, we won't write any feature like "copy my database to the Digikam format", nor do we expect Digikam to be able to import our stuff. (There's nothing holding you back in writing your own converter, though -- our format is pretty simple to deal with.) What we will do, however, is adding a feature for metadata import and export. We'll use standardized stuff like Exif, IPTC and XMP, so that it should be easy for KPhotoAlbum users to provide their friends with images with embedded tags (and the other way round, of course).

KDE4, SQL,...

Another question was a state of the KDE4 port and the SQL support. I'll leave that for another blogpost, as this one got pretty long already :).

Got a comment? Feel free to mail them to me!
Tags: gentoo, kde.