| The KPhotoAlbum Handbook |
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Copyright © 2003-2007 Jesper K. Pedersen
This is the user manual for KPhotoAlbum. If you are not the type who likes reading documentation, but rather just want to try out things, here are a few alternatives:
Go to the KPhotoAlbum Homepage, and look at the quick overview, screen shoots, and introduction videos.
Start KPhotoAlbum, and accepts its offer for a demo (If this is your first time you start it), or go to menu and select . That will load KPhotoAlbum with a number of images, and let you browse around.
If you prefer to print out this document, then you may find it as on long HTML document at KPhotoAlbum's Homepage
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Jesper | Introduction |
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Table of Contents
If you are like me you have thousands of images ever since you got your first camera, some taken with a normal camera other with a digital camera. Through all the years you believed that until eternity you would be able to remember the story behind every single picture, you would be able to remember the names of all the people on your images, and you would be able to remember the exact date of every single image. I personally realized that this was not possible anymore, and especially for my digital images - but also for my paper images - I needed a tool to help me describe my images, and to search in the pile of images. This is exactly what KPhotoAlbum is all about.
KPhotoAlbum focuses on three key points:
It must be easy to annotate a number of images at a time. It must for example not take more than a few mouse clicks to mark all your images from your holiday as being from Italy, 1992. KPhotoAlbum offers two ways of describing images: one at a time, which is useful for writing text about images, and All Simultaneously, which is useful for selecting a number of images, and setting properties like location, people on images, and date of image.
It must be easy to search for images. KPhotoAlbum offers to describe images with a number of properties. These includes date, people, places, plus a keyword field the user can use for custom keywords like Album 7 or Holiday trip to Italy. With KPhotoAlbum you can search for images in each of the categories - e.g. find all the images with Jesper on them from the holiday in Italy. It is of course possible to create your own categories, much more on that later.
It must be easy to browse and View the images. When viewing images, your focus often changes - one moment you are looking at images from your holiday in 1992, and when seeing an image of a friend whom you spent that holiday with, you focus suddenly changes, so you want to see all images of that friend.
In this manual I will take you through the steps of (1) annotating your images, (2) browsing and viewing images and (3) advanced topics and customization.
KPhotoAlbum started out as an application for managing your images, but since then it has been extended, so it today also takes care of your videos. In many places in this manual I will talk about images, but just as often the discussion does include videos.
| Organization of images and KPhotoAlbum files |
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KPhotoAlbum uses all the images of a directory and all subdirectories below it, first time you start KPhotoAlbum, you will be ask for the location of this directory. KPhotoAlbum will not modify any images, so you do not have to be afraid of KPhotoAlbum altering your images [1], actually if you do not trust KPhotoAlbum, feel free to make all your images write protected.
KPhotoAlbum will save all its information in the file
index.xml in your topmost image directory. This file
is a simple XML file, so you can easily back it up using whatever tools
you prefer, including normal backup utilities, copying the file to a
floppy disk, or keeping revisions using CVS.
KPhotoAlbum will remember where you told it your images were
located, and reuse that in future use of KPhotoAlbum. Should you ever want to
load another database into KPhotoAlbum (i.e. another directory tree of
images), then you may start it with the -c option. For
example: kphotoalbum .-c
~/CompanyImages/index.xml
[1] The two exceptions to this rule is (1) if you ask KPhotoAlbum to delete individual images, from ->, and (2) plug-in operations.
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| Introduction | Up | Annotating your images |
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| The KPhotoAlbum Handbook | Up | Organization of images and KPhotoAlbum files |
| Annotating your images |
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Table of Contents
In Figure 2.1, ?Starting KPhotoAlbum with your own images? you can see an example of the window that will greet you once you have started KPhotoAlbum with your own images.
At the top of the screen you will find a menu and toolbar, as you know from any KDE application. Below the toolbar you see the browser window. Currently this is not containing much information, as you have not yet specified any information about your images. In Chapter 3, Browsing we will get back to the browser, but for now, simply press the item, which will show you an overview of all your images.
The key feature of KPhotoAlbum is that you can annotate your images. This includes who is on a given image, where is it taken, etc. You can do this either an image at a time, or you can annotate a number of images simultaneously (For example, all these images contain the person Jesper, and is taken in Copenhagen.)
To annotate an images, select the images in question, and go to ->. Now you annotate your selected images one after the other. If you instead choose , you will annotate all the selected items as if it was one single item. In other words, with this option you mass-annotate your image - e.g. saying all these images was shot in Copenhagen. These two options are also available from a context menu, that you get by right clicking the mouse in the thumbnail overview. An example of this can be seen in Figure 2.2, ?Context menu for editing properties?.
In Figure 2.3, ?Annotating images and videos? below you can see
the window for annotating images and videos. In this window you can specify
the date of the item, the label of the item [2], a description for the item, and most important
different categories for the item. In the screen shot, these categories are
People, Places, and
Keywords, but as you will see in the section called ?Categories?, these three predefined
categories may be changed to your preferences.
All these annotations may be used for searching and browsing, as we will see in Chapter 3, Browsing. On request you may see these annotations when viewing the items in the build-in viewer.
In Figure 2.3, ?Annotating images and videos? there are three list boxes combined with a line edits for specifying people, places and keywords. These widget are a very important part of KPhotoAlbum, as you will use them over and over again, when specifying information about your images.
You can specify a property from a list box, simply by
selecting it (Select say Donna to specify that Donna is
on the given image. Alternatively you may type its name in the line edit.
When you start typing a name in the line edit, KPhotoAlbum will look into the listbox,
and search for the first item matching what you've typed so far, and fill
it out. Thus typing Do might be enough to find
Donna. Once you have found the item you search for,
simply press enter to select this item in the listbox. The item will now be
moved to the top of the view, so next time you need the given item it is
even easier to find.
The idea behind moving images to the top when they have been selected is, that when going to, say a family party, you will get perhaps 50 images all with the same 5-10 people. When typing in information about these 50 images you will have the 5-10 people at the top of the listbox as soon as you have typed in their name the first time.
If you prefer to have the list alphabetically sorted instead, simply press the icon for sorting under the list box.
| Annotating one item at a time |
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When you specify properties for one image at a time, you may still of course select a number of images, and say, I want to annotate these images. In this situation, you will find a next and previous button under the image in the topmost rightmost corner.
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| Annotating your images | Up | Annotating multiple items at a time |
| Annotating multiple items at a time |
| Prev | Annotating your images | Next |
If you have several images with, say the same person, then it might be more convenient to select those images, and specify that this person is on all images using the Annotate Multiple Items at a Time.
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| Annotating one item at a time | Up | Sub-categories |
| Sub-categories |
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Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and California are all located in USA. Furthermore, San Francisco and Los Angeles are located in California.
Instead of specifying for each and every image from San Francisco, that it is in San Francisco, and in California, and in USA, you may instead tell KPhotoAlbum that San Francisco, and Los Angeles are in California, and that California among others are in USA. Doing so the browser (see Chapter 3, Browsing) will offer you an item for USA, and an item for California in addition to all your normal items. Selecting California, you will see all images from San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc.
In Figure 2.4, ?Browser showing USA as a super category? you can see a browser window, containing USA as a super category. To indicate to you that this is a group, a special icon is used.
In the context menu for the annotation dialog it is possible to add an item to an existing or new super or sub category. In addition you may simply drag an item to a category to make it a sub category of that item. Notice this requires that you are currently sorting your categories alphabetically. See Figure 2.5, ?Categories shown in alphabetical view of the annotation dialog?.
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| Annotating multiple items at a time | Up | Changing layout of the annotation dialog |
| Changing layout of the annotation dialog |
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It is possible to move the items of the annotation dialog around, simply from the bar at the top of the frames, and move them around - you can even make a frame into a top level window on its own.
Once you have found a layout that matches your screen layout, your usage of KPhotoAlbum, etc, simply press the button, that will display a popup menu from which you can save the current window layout.
You may also choose to hide away a frame. If you later want to include that frame in your layout, then choose the button, and from there the item. This can be see in Figure 2.6, ?Showing previously hidden windows.?.
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| Sub-categories | Up | Browsing |
[2] The label is initialized to the name of the file. The label is used in the browser, and when the images are exported to HTML pages
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| Organization of images and KPhotoAlbum files | Up | Annotating one item at a time |
| Browsing |
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Table of Contents
Once you have annotated your images and videos, KPhotoAlbum is ready to let you
browse through your images, see Figure 3.1, ?Browser when images and videos have been annotated?. If you compare that to Figure 2.1, ?Starting KPhotoAlbum with your own images? , you will see that there now is
items available in each of the categories for People,
Places, and Keywords.
In the browser window you can see the categories you typed information into when annotating your images and videos. In addition there are items for searching based on EXIF information on images, browsing the folder structure of your hard disk, and of course showing the actual thumbnails. Lets describe each item in turn.
Pressing the mouse on
People, the browser window will change, as you can see
in Figure 3.2, ?Browser window when People was selected.?.
The browser is now populated with the people you specified for
your images and videos [3],
selecting a person will bring you back to the original state for the
browser, as we saw in Figure 3.1, ?Browser when images and videos have been annotated?, this
time, however, we are in the scope of the person
we selected. That means that we only shows information about images and
videos containing that person. See Figure 3.3, ?Browser limited to the scope of the person Jesper?
below, which is the result of us selecting the Person Jesper, you can see an
indication of that in the bottom of the window. Please compare Figure 3.1, ?Browser when images and videos have been annotated? with Figure 3.3, ?Browser limited to the scope of the person Jesper?, where you will see that the number
of available images and videos has gone down from 25 to 12, and the amount of
items for the different categories have also changed.
If we now continue selecting a new person, then we will get to the images containing both people. Continuing that way you can narrow the set of images that you have in mind down to a few images from a set of thousands.
When you are done limiting the scope of images, you may select the View Thumbnails icon, to see exactly those images matching your current scope.
Looking at Figure 3.2, ?Browser window when People was selected.? you will see that each person has the same icon in front of his name. KPhotoAlbum is actual capable of showing a preview image for each individual person [4] as can be seen in Figure 3.4, ?Images for each Individual Person?.
To show images along with the names, choose the tool button to the very right of the toolbar, that will bring up a popup menu, where you can chose which view you want to use for the given category. Notice views must be configured for each category - that way you may for example use an icon view for people, but a plain list view for keywords (in case you can't come up with good images for your keywords).
It is, however, your job to tell it which images to use for each individual person. To do so, you must open the viewer (see Chapter 5, The Viewer), and from the context menu choose , this will bring up the category editor which can be seen in Figure 3.5, ?Category Editor?. In the category editor you choose the image for the given person. In the viewer its possible to zoom to part of the image, and that way crop what part should be shown.
| General image searches |
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If you chose the Search item in the browser, you will get to a dialog with great resemblance to the dialog you used for setting properties of your images. You can see this dialog in Figure 3.6, ?Search dialog? below.
If you type a string in the label or description field, then that text will be searched for using substring searches. Likewise you can also specify a date to search for, either as part of a date, say 1971, or as a complete date. You may also specify date ranges, like 1971-1980.
The options item allow a very limited form of writing
expression, as you can see an example of in the Figure 3.6, ?Search dialog?. Here we search for images with Jesper,
but without Anne Helene.
The allowed operations are & (meaning and), | (meaning or), and ! (not meaning not).
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| Browsing | Up | Thumbnail viewer |
[3] You may notice that the item
Pets has a special icon. For details about that, see
the section called ?Categories?.
[4] This of course also applies to places, keywords, and other categories you have defined yourself.
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| Changing layout of the annotation dialog | Up | General image searches |
| Thumbnail viewer |
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Table of Contents
Selecting View Thumbnails in the browser, you get to a thumbnail overview of the images currently in scope (or all images if no scope have been selected). An example of this can be seen in Figure 4.1, ?Thumbnail View? below. The size of the thumbnails can be configure simply by dragging the mouse with the middle mouse button down (try it is really cool).
In the thumbnail overview you can reorder your pictures by dragging them around with the mouse. For the date bar to work properly you should, however, aim at keeping your images sorted at all time. Sorting you images can be done by selecting all images, and choosing ->. The sorting will not reorder images which has the same date and time, so if you have say 100 images with the date 1992 (i.e. no month, no day, only year), then you may move them around, and their individual order will stay unchanged after a sort.
Dragging an image from the viewer to the background will set the image as the background image of your desktop.
By clicking on an image you load it into the viewer, if no viewer window is present, a viewer window will be created.
If you select a number of images, and presses Ctrl-I or chooses ->, the images will be loaded into the existing viewer (if no viewer exists, one will be created). Alternatively you may choose -> to get the images loaded into a new viewer. If you press Ctrl-R or choose -> the selected images will be loaded into the viewer and a slide show will start. Finally choosing -> will show a slide show of the images selected in random order.
From the thumbnail view it is also possible to delete images. To do so select the images you want to delete and press the delete key or select -> from the menu bar. Doing so KPhotoAlbum will show you the dialog in Figure 4.2, ?Deleting Images?
There are two ways of deleting an image in KPhotoAlbum, namely either delete it from the disk, which means that it will be permanently gone, or tell KPhotoAlbum not to include it. In the later situation, KPhotoAlbum will never again show the image, but it will keep it on disk. This is useful if there for example is thumbnail images stored among your images. This thumbnail image would contain an overview of all the other images, and would thus be useless in KPhotoAlbum, but for other application, say a web browser, it might be needed.
| Offline Mode |
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There is a constant battle going on between data growing, and hard disks getting bigger. If you have a large number of images, you might find yourself in the middle of that battle, not having enough hard disk space to store all your images. In that situation you might choose to put some of the images on CD's. An alternative scenario might be that you are going on a business trip, and want to bring your images with you, but do not have the 20GB disk space requires for that purpose.
KPhotoAlbum offers a solution to that problem, namely that it allows you to use it, without having the images available on disk. You do of course need to have them available at some point in time for KPhotoAlbum to realize that there are new images for it to index. Figure 4.3, ?KPhotoAlbum in Offline Mode? shows KPhotoAlbum when it is not capable of finding all needed images on the disk.
Images which has the corner cut of (that is image 1-9) are not available on disk. Thumbnails are, however, available for images 5-9, therefore KPhotoAlbum can show you the thumbnails for these images. You can, however, still not display these images in the viewer.
As you can see, this feature requires you to copy files in and out of your directories, KPhotoAlbum does not have any support for asking you to insert the CD you labeled blah blah. Thus please forget about this feature if you are the kind of person who do not like messing with files etc, and instead simply ensure to buy hard disks that is large enough to always store all your images.
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| Thumbnail viewer | Up | Privacy |
| Privacy |
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Some time ago my girlfriend and I brought my laptop with us on a visit to my parents in law, to show them the images from our most recent holiday. KPhotoAlbum turned out to be a great success, and it didn't last long before my girlfriends little sister seized the laptop and started browsing around on her own. Unfortunately it didn't take her long either to get to some, let say unfortunate, images of me from my youth, and they all had quite a bit of laugh on me. That episode inspired me to add a new feature to KPhotoAlbum, namely privacy locking.
In the menu you will find a sub menu called . To get some privacy, browse - while you are on your own - to the images that you want to keep private, and select from the privacy sub menu. Alternatively you may browse to the images you want to limit your little sister to see, and select .
Now you have specified what to hide away, and once you hand over your laptop to your little sister, simply choose , and your sister will not be able to see the locked images. When done you may unlock them again using .
It is possible to specify a password that must be entered to unlock the database. In the menu, simply select to set a password.
Don't get fooled to believe that this will help you hide away images
for good. First the images are still on the disk, second, anyone with
access to the index.xml file that KPhotoAlbum uses can read
the password in clear text and optionally delete it. This feature is only
meant as a protection against someone sitting with KPhotoAlbum unintentionally
getting to your private images.
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| Offline Mode | Up | The Viewer |
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| General image searches | Up | Offline Mode |
| The Viewer |
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Table of Contents
The reason for you to put all your images into KPhotoAlbum, and spending hours after hours describing them, is of course that you at some point want to look at them. For that purpose KPhotoAlbum has an viewer capable of showing your images and videos. You open the viewer from the thumbnail view as described in Chapter 4, Thumbnail viewer.
The viewer can be seen in Figure 5.1, ?The Viewer?. The viewer does of course show you the image, but in addition to that it also shows you the information you specified for each image, including, who is on the images, where and when it was takes etc.
In case the info box is located on top of part of the images you actually want to see, you can simply grab it with the mouse, and move it elsewhere on the image. It is possible to configure what should be shown in the info box, and of course whether it should be shown at all. All these options are available by right clicking your mouse on the viewer. The context menu can be seen in Figure 5.2, ?The viewer's context menu? below.
Some of the words in the info box is underlines. If you click the
mouse on one of these words the browser (see Chapter 3, Browsing)
will go into scope of that item. Thus if you click on Anne
Helene the browser will show you all images of Anne Helene, just
as it would have done if you selected People from the
root of the browser, and next selected Anne
Helene.
In the info box you can see a small button with the KPhotoAlbum logo. Pressing that button will get you to the thumbnail viewer. The thumbnail view will display all images, and the image you just had in the viewer will be selected. The idea behind this is the following: you browse to a given person, and look at the images of that person. One of the images is from say your high school time, and now you want to see images from that period of time. Using the Jump to Context button, you are brought to the thumbnail view showing all images, with the current one being in focus, and likely all your high school pictures around it.
In case you have loaded several images into the viewer, you can go forth and back using Page Up and Page Down. You can go to the first and last images using Home and End. These functions are of course also available from the context menu.
If several images was loaded into the viewer, you can ask it to run them as a slide show, which means that KPhotoAlbum loads a new image every few second. How often it loads a new image is configure by pressing the control key and respective plus (for go faster) or minus (go slower). Starting and stopping the slide show is done simply by pressing Ctrl-S.
A very useful feature of the KPhotoAlbum viewer is it ability to go into full screen mode. In this mode, the viewer is using the complete screen space, simply press the return key to make it go into and out of full screen mode.
Using the viewer, you may zoom in and out of your image, simply by dragging out a rectangle with the mouse. Pressing the minus key will zoom out again. Pressing the plus key will zoom in at the center of the image. Figure 5.3, ?Zooming in the viewer? below shows how a zoom rectangle is marked, and Figure 5.4, ?Zooming in the viewer? shows the result of the zoom.
Pressing the period key, lets you reset zooming, so the image is shown unzoomed. Pressing the equal sign will set the zoom level so each pixel on the screen correspond to a pixel in the image.
Notice, for technical the only zooming operation that works when watching videos are zoom in and out (the plus and minus key).
Choosing the rotate operations from the context menu, you may rotate the image (Does not work for videos). You can annotate the current image, simply by choosing in the context menu.
When viewing the images you may find that a given image contains a person whose name you forgot to set on the images. At this time you may cancel your viewing, and rush to the image config dialog to specify the person. However, you may prefer to just tag the image and continue on viewing images.
An alternative situation is if you want to sent a number of images to a printer to get them developed on paper. To see which you want, you start the viewer on the images, and tag them as good or bad while by inspecting see each one.
For the above two examples the viewer offers you to set tokens on the images when viewing them. Tokens are named from A to Z, and you set a token simply by pressing its letter. In Figure 5.5, ?An Image with Tokens? you may see an image where the tokens A, B and C are set.
Once you've set tokens on your images, they will be available for regular browsing in the browser, as can be seen in Figure 5.6, ?Tokens seen in the Browser?. So when you've marked images that needs to be edited, printed, or whatever, simply browse to the images, and annotate all images at a time (as described in the section called ?Annotating multiple items at a time?), use a plugin to copy the selected images to a CD, or whatever you need to do.
Categories (and esp tokens) may be displayed in the thumbnail viewer. When Showing the categories in the thumbnail viewer, you may also add tokens to images, simply by pressing the letter for the token when the image is selected, this can be seen in Figure 5.7, ?Tokens seen in the Thumbnail Viewer?
| Drawing on Images |
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Sometimes it might not be obvious what you want to show with a given image, for that purpose KPhotoAlbum allows you to draw on the images.
The actual drawing is not saved to the image, but rather to the database, that way you can undo your drawing at a later point.
In Figure 5.8, ?Drawing on Images? you can see an image drawn on. To bring KPhotoAlbum in to drawing mode, select from the context menu. To quit drawing, press the cross in the toolbar at the top of the window.
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| The Viewer | Up | The Datebar |
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| Privacy | Up | Drawing on Images |
| The Datebar |
| Prev | Next |
At the bottom of the KPhotoAlbum main window, you will find the data bar (see Figure 6.1, ?The Date Bar?). As the name indicates it shows date statistics over the images in your database.
The individual bars indicates how many images are within the given period. In the figure above you may see that I have 261 images from January 2005. The bars encode two informations, namely how many images that have an exact date within the given period, and how many have an overlap with the given period. A picture which has a date that says 2005 will thus count as an overlap for all the month of 2005, while an image from Jan 24th 2005 will count as an exact date for January 2005. Exact matches are displayed with green, while inexact matches are displayed in yellow. Thus in December 2004 I have 86 images with exact count, and 61 with overlap count. (I know the counts by hovering the mouse over the given range, since this displays the counts in the status bar).
The date bar offers you a number of different granularities, where each bar displays a different time range. The range are years, month, weeks, days, hours, and 10 minutes. Figure 6.2, ?The Date Bar Showing 10 Minutes Intervals? shows you part of my database where each bar shows only 10 minutes.
The date bar is interactive in two ways, first you may navigate the thumbnail view from the database - selecting a date will scroll the thumbnail view so the first image from that date is displayed. Second, when you navigate around in the thumbnail view, the date bar will update to display the date of the images currently displayed.
You may also drag out a range in the data bar. You do so by pressing and dragging the mouse in the ruler part of the date bar, i.e. on the time stamps. When you select a range, the thumbnail viewer will display only images from that range. You cancel a selection by pressing the cancel button at the left side of the datebar.
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| Drawing on Images | Up | Generating HTML |
| Generating HTML |
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Table of Contents
KPhotoAlbum offers two possibilities for generating HTML from your photo album. One is the implementation build into KPhotoAlbum, the other is available as an plugin (see Chapter 9, Plugins). This section will describe the build in version, which you may find in the menubar ->
Before HTML pages are generated, you need to specify a bit of information, split over the three pages Content, Layout and Destination. The following section describes each page in detail.
In the content page you specify which information should be generated to the HTML pages.
First you specify the title of the overview pages, plus a description generated on these pages. See KPhotoAlbum example HTML pages to see an example of this.
Next you specify whether a KPhotoAlbum export file should be generated, and put on the overview page. See Chapter 8, Import/Exporting for details on export files.
Finally you may specify which information should be generated on the HTML pages. This way you may skip generating information which might be obvious to the reader of the pages (say these images was from the party we all attended). Notice, KPhotoAlbum does currently not allow you to exclude certain categories from the export file, so don't rely on this as a way of excluding information you do not want readers of your pages to see.
| The Layout page |
| Prev | Generating HTML | Next |
On the layout page you specify what your HTML pages should look like. Most of the options on this page are straight forward, and do not need further description here.
At the bottom of this page it is possible to specify several resolution for images. This way people reading your pages are not forced to download images in large resolutions, say 1600x1200, just to see it on a monitor not offering more than say 800x600.
At any time your readers may change resolution among those you specified. That way they may browse through your images in low resolution (and thus fast download time), and when they see an image of special interest, they may change to high resolution.
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| Generating HTML | Up | The Destination page |
| The Destination page |
| Prev | Generating HTML | Next |
On the destination page you specify several directories and URL's specifying where your pages goes.
The philosophy is that you specify a base directory for all your generations, and for each generation specify a new subdirectory.
First you need to specify the base directory for all your images. This directory will be remembered from session to session, and allows you to once and for all tell where all subsequent images should go. Here you may specify a directory, or any protocol supported by KDE. Examples includes:
ftp://someserver/my-upload-area/images (upload using FTP)
fish://someserver/home/foo/images (upload using ssh)
smb://someserver/c/images (upload to a Windows share)
Once you are done generating your images, you may want to check whether they are really available to your audience. If you specify a URL in the Base URL line edit, a web browser will be spawned once HTML pages has been generated. The URL you specify here should match the directory you specified above. Thus the web browser will be started on the subdirectories of this URL.
Once you have generated HTML pages, your pages may still not be in their final destination, you may still need special upload procedures out of the control of KPhotoAlbum. For the Import feature (see Chapter 8, Import/Exporting) to work, you need to specify the final destination of the pages. Again this does not include the subdirectory of the current generation.
The three line edits described above are all base directories and base URL's. At these locations a new subdirectory will be created named with the name you specify in Output Directory.
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| The Layout page | Up | Import/Exporting |
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| The Datebar | Up | The Layout page |
| Import/Exporting |
| Prev | Next |
Table of Contents
If you attend a family party, a company meeting, a conference, or any other event where other KPhotoAlbum users may be present, you may wish to share your images with those people. You may of course choose to generate HTML pages for them to browse, but given you already have spent time classifying all images (Who is on the images, where were they taken etc), there are no reason for them to redo all that work.
KPhotoAlbum allows you to export a set of your images into a
.kim file, which other people may import into
their database, to get your classification for these images.
Two different kind of .kim files exists,
inlines or externals, referring to whether the images them self are
located in the file or at some other location. Placing the images in
the file has the obvious advantage that the file is self contained,
while it has the equally obvious disadvantage of the file being
rather big.
There are two places from which you may generate a
.kim file, namely directly from
->,
or along with HTML pages (see Chapter 7, Generating HTML). Creating a
.kim file during HTML export will create an
external .kim file.
External .kim files will search for images in
one of two ways. First it will try to look for the images next to the
.kim file, and if not found, it will search for them
at the URL specified when the .kim file was
created. Notice the later is only possible for
.kim files created during HTML export.
This section will tell you about the export dialog which you get to from ->.
The most important part of this dialog is specifying whether
the .kim file should be internal or external
(see description above). You have the following three
options:
Include in .kim file - this
will be an internal file
Manual copy next to .kim file - Here you must copy the images yourself next to the .kim file
Automatically copy next to .kim file - here KPhotoAlbum will copy the images for you.
Between you and me, .kim files are really
just zip files. Normally it is not worth bothering compressing the
files because images normally are compressed JPEG already, and the
XML file itself are really tiny. If you really want to squish out
the last few bytes, you may still do so, by checking
Compress Export File
The final option on the page are Limit maximum image
dimension. When sending some images to some friends,
you may not want to send images in full size, as the
.kim file might be huge. For this, you may
specify that the maximum dimension of images should be say maximum 800
pixels in each direction.
| Import Dialog |
| Prev | Import/Exporting | Next |
When you select a .kim file from a web
browser, or choose
->,
KPhotoAlbum will import the database exported with the functionality described in Chapter 8, Import/Exporting.
The import wizard consist of four steps. First you must specify which images you want to import. Next you must specify in which directory to put the imported images.
Chances are that you call the people category personen (if you are German), while I in Danish might call this category personer. In the third step of the import dialog, you must specify which category from the import file to import, plus which categories in your database they match.
I might call myself in my databases for me, while in your database I'm called Jesper K. Pedersen. Step four let you set up matching for each of the imported categories. This can be see in Figure 8.1, ?Matching People in the Import Dialog ?.
In the screen shot you may see that Donna is the same in both the .kim file and in my database - the name is shown in black to indicate a perfect match in the database. The other three names was not found in the database, though both Jesper and Anne Helene was found matching as substring, so these are suggested. Finally in my database I didn't have Spiff (or I might have named it quite differently), so KPhotoAlbum simply suggest Spiff for the import name.
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| Import/Exporting | Up | Plugins |
| Prev | Home | Next |
| The Destination page | Up | Import Dialog |
| Plugins |
| Prev | Next |
KPhotoAlbum shares a plugin system with a number of other image applications, among these digiKam and Gwenview. The plugin system is named Kipi, which is short for KDE Image Plugin Interface. See Kipi Homepage
The plugins are available from the menu bar, under the item . The plugins will and can not be described in this manual, as the plugins are not part of KPhotoAlbum, but shipped separately. Most plugins do, however have a help page available from the plugin itself.
As the plugins are shared between a number of applications, certain plugins might be very little tested with KPhotoAlbum, you should therefore always try out new plugins with the demo database before you try them on your own images[5] (Don't say I didn't warn you!).
The applications using KIPI are very different from each other, this means that some plugins are not always working the KPhotoAlbum way, but after all, this is the price for sharing the functionality between the applications.
The most important difference between KPhotoAlbum and the other applications using KIPI, is that the other applications order the images in albums, where an album simply is a directory. KPhotoAlbum do not have this concept; nevertheless, for certain plugins to function, KPhotoAlbum behaves towards the plugin system as if it did.
KPhotoAlbum does this by defining the current album to be the current view - that is, all the images the browser currently offers to display.
In addition to the current album, KPhotoAlbum must also be able to give a list of all albums; KPhotoAlbum defines this list in the following way:
When KPhotoAlbum's browser displays the content of a category, say people, then each item in this category will look like an album to the plugin.
Otherwise, the category you specify for Category for virtual albums in the options dialog, will be used; e.g. if you specify People with this option, then KPhotoAlbum will act as if you had just chosen to display people and then invoke the plugin which needs to know about all albums.
Some plugins might be redundant to features implemented in KPhotoAlbum, and in that case you may not want to see them at all in the Plugin menu. For that, you may go to the options dialog, and specify which plugins should be shown at all.
[5] You start KPhotoAlbum with the demo setup either
from the shell by executing kphotoalbum
, or from the menu.-demo
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| Import Dialog | Up | Configuring KPhotoAlbum |
