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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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