I switched from Windoze to Ubuntu a while ago, and recently started using Shotwell for my 2500 or so photos. I like it a lot.
Many years ago I wrote a Windoze program to catalogue my photos (using Visual Foxpro, a database language). It has two features that I would like to see in Shotwell. First, a photograph could be assigned to a "category" (e.g. "Grandchildren", "Family" etc). It has the ability to select only those photos in a category. Second, and most useful, is a "description" field into which I entered a comment about the photo (e.g. "Fred, Sam and Mary at John's thirty-ninth birthday party"). The program allowed for a full-text search (e.g. show me all the photos having "john" and "birthday" in the description. Some of this can be done using Shotwell's tags. For example, I wrote a PHP program to add tags for the categories to the photos database. Now I can select all the photos in the "Family" category. I also added all the words from the description fields as tags, so I can find all photos with "birthday". The upcoming Boolean search capability will make this more useful. However, their are problems with tags. The first is that they are case-sensitive (John and john are different tags). And there are far too many of them in the tag list now - hundreds in fact. If the tags were not case sensitive, then they would be quite useable as my category field (although my program allowed for sorting by category). The description stuff is easy to handle in the database. SQLite supports full-text search (although it needs to have the support compiled into it, which I just did for testing). A "description" window could be added (just like the Tag window, although larger). Then a full-text search window could be added. I have the Shotwell source and the Valac compiler. I'd like to take a look at doing this myself, and if it works, then the authors of Shotwell could look at using it. I could use some tips as to where to start looking in the source to make these kind of changes. I've been browsing through the Shotwell docs, but if any of the authors would care to point me in the right direction, I would really like to play with his a bit. Thanks -- Larry Bradley Orleans (Ottawa) Canada _______________________________________________ Shotwell mailing list [email protected] http://lists.yorba.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/shotwell
