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:
… expanding to
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 :).
