> Hence my interest in your presentation - I was hoping someone else had > been here before me so I could leave my wheel design alone. No such > luck, eh?
Not yet, no. What really surprises me is that there's no decent solution, given that the first thing every owner of a digikam does is put their shots online... Have a look at http://albumshaper.sourceforge.net/ But be warned: no packages to install, compile from source. Worse, it uses a very late Qt (4.1.2), and SUSE 10.1 (2 months old!) only has 4.1.0, not enough for albumshaper. I had a discussion about this with the author. While I understand that there is a place for cutting-edge development, this sort of approach is useless for putting Linux on the desktop of the non-savvy. (And I'm not going to upgrade Qt either.) > So far, my script uses Perlmagick extensively to identify exif data, and The problem with all the scripts is that they're ok for you and me, but no good to $USER. Which isn't saying anything bad about $USER, it's just acknowledging that a computer should be a tool which can be used by $USER to get the job done, e.g. putting an album online. As an aside, I have yet to see a perl GUI app which wasn't so dog slow as to be useless (not mentioning not looking like puke), but I have seen acceptable GUI apps programed in python. Keep your options open before you spend much more time. > At this point, I am investigating the use of php and mysql to obtain a > dynamic webgallery that could be easily searched on (something my > current implementation lacks) and would solve the current descriptive > naming restrictions. [change topic to photo organisation] I am still of the opinion that a flat text file with, say, filename, or better directory name, and the remainder of the line with some sort of description perhaps including tags (keywords), does go a very long way. You have to be organised though, and be able to run basic Unix shell commands for text processing (most notably grep). My previous attempts are in a script called makeimage, included in my scriptutils package. For digital photos, I put another script on top of that, which I'd have to tidy up before release. That script mainly handles my file organisation, for which I've written myself a specification. That essentially has a directory structure like year/month/day/N-topic/YYMMDD-nnnXX.jpeg It is utmost important to have year/month/date numerical, and in that order. "topic" is a descriptive string, N serves to make the topics of that day chronological. nnn is a daily sequence number, XX photographer's initials. This structure can be easily backed up on DVD by months, whenever a number of months fill a DVD. For searching I use my memory, or grep on a test file which I have created. For real film I used a sequential film number and the frame number on the edge of the film strip, but that scheme no longer works with digital. I thought about mentioning all this at the talk, but for starters there wouldn't have been time, and more importantly, the method falls flat for the non-shell-savvy. On the positive, it's independent of any GUI app which has a good chance of not being around any more in 10 years' time. The next best bet would be to add tags and comments into the JPEGs, in the hope that there can always be a GUI app be found which can make use of these strings. Many options available, that's why I said everyone needs to think carefully about how they organise themselves, and look 10-30 years ahead. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
