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Re: [ProgSoc] managing digital photos
On Sun, 21 Aug 2005 1:59 pm, vik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
] The main stipulation I have are that it has to be portable. I don't want
] to be locked in to any one program, should I choose to change OS or find a
] better program, or come back to my photos in 20 years time and have to dig
] up an ancient copy of some program to search through them. Are there
] programs which store this meta-data within the JPG file? Most of the ones
] I've come across seem to use their own DB. It would also be nice to run
] this in Linux (though I've successfully tried Google's Picasa in Wine).
]
] What do other people use and why?
I use KimDaBa, because it does what I want to do, it's fast, and
it's easy to move its database between machines, and it runs on
GNU/Linux (it's a KDE app, but obviously would run under any wm).
Until Reiser's grand plans for the file system are realised, you're
probably not going to get the ideal world (total transparency,
total portability) solution you're seeking.
KimDaBa stores its database in a single file (index.xml) which has
its pros and cons. It's fast to load, doesn't use a lot of space,
doesn't require a db engine to be installed and running -- but
does limit concurrent write-access (where limit = disallows), merging
data can be Fun.
I think the 20-year-fear thing is based on the false assumption that
one day you're going to wake up and the world will have changed
while you were asleep. The author (Jesper) and contributing coders
to this project all heavily rely on this bit of software, and it's
unlikely that they'll wake up one morning and decide that they
don't anymore -- so you either get a maintained product, or you get
a reliable migration path to the Next Big Thing -- either of those
work well for me.
Because it's XML it's relatively easy to write something to pull data
out and bang it into another utility (or pay someone to do same),
in the worst case scenario.
I have about 8,000 photos within the system at the moment, and
there's a few people on their mailing list with well over 10,000.
KimDaBa takes kipi plugins, and the author pounces on bugs (if you
can find 'em) and is very responsive to feature requests (although he
often comes up first with some very good reasons why you don't really
want that particular feature).
I think putting meta data in JPG's is ... an interesting idea, and
certainly has its place. I believe the format of JPG lends itself to
reading the header information rather than the entire file to look
for this kind of data, but the main problem as I see it is the fact
that no all images are JPG's -- my digital camera goes to TIFF
or CRW in times of stress, and meta data isn't available in a lot
of these bigger formats. PNG tagging is something I sorely miss,
as a more common example.
A word of warning, though, if you give it a try -- a lot of the
really cool features of the program aren't really obvious until you
play around with it for a while. Many reviewers have spent their
alloted half hour with it and then written it up as a hopeless
product, simply because they didn't 'get it', or didn't put enough
data into it in order to see it in normal operation, let alone to get
a good idea of its strengths. Read the manual and FAQ very
carefully before delving into it. Design of your meta data is also
something that, regardless of the app you eventually use, needs
very careful consideration -- and regrettably you don't really know
what your design should be until you've been using the app for a
while. No easy solution to that problem, unfortunately.
Jedd.
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