Digikam Sprint
While the planet is flooded with reports from the marketing, promo and www sprint, there is another sprint happening in a beautiful place called Essen in Germany.
I arrived there in the afternoon. It was nice to finally meet the people behind Digikam and the kipi-plugins. A few years ago I learned C++/Qt hacking while working on Digikam. It was a wonderful time. Since then I’ve moved on, but I’ve returned to this sprint to give a presentation about Akonadi. As Akonadi is fully type independent, it is able to be used for Digikam. It would open a nice new set of oppertunities.
For example, you could organize your images while your offline. Not only the images on your local hard disk, but also on your Facebook, Flickr or Gallery based website. As soon as you connect to the internet again, it would execute all the moves. Can make that train trip to Berlin so much more productive, right?
Another feature would be to use your image based resources to attach an image as an attachment to an email. No longer select an image from disk, but select an image from an album, as you would see them in Digikam.
I’ve not realized that at a Digikam meeting there would be a lot of people with digital camera’s around. We already decided that it looks a lot more like Digikam Next Top Model, instead of a Digikam sprint….
Yeah, the meeting was really great, and Marcel did a wonderful job organizing everything.
I don’t know who’s planning to run for digiKam Next Top Model, but in any case I look forward to seeing the bunch of pictures that we took.
It could be used also for clipart (f.e. in KOffice) or wallpapers.
And common interface for all remote picture services would be great.
But what about size? Is akonadi prepared for caching few GB of pictures?
It (with Nepomuk integration) helps make use cases like:
- In KAddresBook browse all photos tagged with person for setting as contact’s photo
- connect album/set of pictures with event, and next display it in KOrganizer
- Browse images sent by person in emails, im, or in theses person on-line gallery
Nice to hear that spring went well.
We don’t store images in Akonadi. There is a serialisation and deserialisation process before it goes to Akonadi. That way we can save the images in temp files for example and only store the reference to it. When the information is requested, the deserialiser puts the image back into the item and delivers it to the requesting application. That way we can keep the database clean, mean and fast.