pity [LWN.net]

pity

Posted Apr 18, 2005 18:22 UTC (Mon) by havoc (guest, #2261)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

I was shocked at the total non-comprehension of the genius of KimDaBa. After having used KimDaBa for well over a year, I was insulted that Mr. Grumpy didn't even begin to understand what he was looking at when he was looking at KimDaBa.

A bit of internal fussing and mussing brought me to the analogy of a similar comparison between vim and emacs from the point of view of someone who has never used anything similar. I can imaging text something like this: "These are not editors! These are software torture devices. This garbage is not possibly usable by any human!"

I'm betting that users of the other software feel similarly short changed. It must have been a long, painful day for Mr. Grumpy. These five packages take mostly different approaches to the issue of image management. I can't imagine trying to grasp those concepts in just a few hours. Makes my head hurt.

That said, KimDaBa is an image management tool only. Rather than trying to do a half-baked job of editing, cropping, printing, etc., Jesper (the author of KimDaBa) has chosen to focus on image management, and leave the other tasks, done so well by other apps, to other applications and their teams. If I had the skill, I would write an article about KimDaBa and submit it for inclusion in a Defensive User's Guide for LWN.

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pity

Posted Apr 18, 2005 23:03 UTC (Mon) by gallir (guest, #5735) [Link]

:w
:q
:q!

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

Posted Apr 19, 2005 2:17 UTC (Tue) by wjhenney (guest, #11768) [Link]

Hang on, if you are the "real" Havoc then who is the other one? Or are
you so committed to LWN that you bought two subscriptions? I feel like I
have entered the Twilight Zone....

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

Posted Apr 19, 2005 13:14 UTC (Tue) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

I don't know who "havoc" is, hp = Havoc Pennington

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

Posted Apr 19, 2005 14:02 UTC (Tue) by havoc (guest, #2261) [Link]

I apologize for the confusion. In one sense, I am an impostor -- in that I am NOT Havoc Pennington. I have used "havoc" as my online presence since ~1989. In that sense, I am "havoc."

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

Posted Apr 19, 2005 14:32 UTC (Tue) by wjhenney (guest, #11768) [Link]

OK, thanks for clearing things up. I guess that with 6 billion potential
linux users in the world, then nobody's name is going to stay unique for
ever anyhow :)

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

Posted Apr 19, 2005 15:29 UTC (Tue) by coolian (guest, #14818) [Link]

And you are creating "havoc" in hp's world.

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

Posted Apr 19, 2005 17:52 UTC (Tue) by havoc (guest, #2261) [Link]

"Oh, great! Now I have guilt!"

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

Posted Apr 19, 2005 19:55 UTC (Tue) by berntsen (guest, #4650) [Link]

Hm. can't resist making a reference to hp's blog which contains a reference to the "problem" http://log.ometer.com/2005-04.html#9 (not direct link, but search for havoc below).

Just happened to have gotten that link from a friend the other day (and I read on to see the havoc problem), thought it was funny to stumble over this confusion thingy afterwards. They world is "small", probably comes from results of random graph theory (7, I think to recall, handshakes on average between any two people on the earth).

Well, its probably just me being weird and shying away from work at this late hour.

Cheers,
/\/ (formerly (un)known as nike, berntsen, knb, nberntsen, ...)

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

Posted Apr 21, 2005 13:34 UTC (Thu) by nhasan (guest, #1699) [Link]

Ok...all is good now. I was rather shocked to hear "hp" defending a KDE application so ferociously. Sanity is restored.

pity

Posted Apr 19, 2005 13:25 UTC (Tue) by sitaram (subscriber, #5959) [Link]

Jon,

Great article as usual, but maybe I can add something here.

(1) where's the "in-law removal plugin" ? :-)

(2) gqview + kimdaba (hot keys to GIMP from gqview when needed) is what I use. The duplicate search in gqview is really something!

(3) kimdaba: read on...

KimDaBa's best feature is the drill down/incremental search. Lets just use the 3 default categories (keywords, location, person), although you can add your own categories and all the stuff below still applies.

Say I click on the keyword link, which shows me a choice of all the possible "keywords" there are in the system. I click on one of those keywords (say, "parties"), then the whole view changes to show only the subset of the photos that have that keyword. Now click on locations, say, and then on one particular location (say "Wynkoop") and you've subsetted it further. You get the idea...

If that's not good enough, there's a fairly neat search dialog with AND and OR searches (within each category).

Makes searching REALLY fast and easy, but there's no way you could have annotated 3000 photographs in one afternoon to actually get the benefit of this, so I can't honestly blame you or feel upset that you didn't like it.

pity

Posted Apr 19, 2005 15:46 UTC (Tue) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Isn't the duplicate images thing a kipi plugin? I used it from Digikam to weed out the duplicates
of my images. Is it really only three years ago we got that digital camera? Seven or eight
thousand pictures later...

Too slow

Posted Apr 20, 2005 18:07 UTC (Wed) by abredon (guest, #2038) [Link]

>but there's no way you could have annotated 3000 photographs in one afternoon to actually get the benefit of this

That's the problem I personally have with kimdaba - it's too slow at organizing.
With the program I currently use (IMatch - a Windows program), I can sift through and tag over 1,000 images in under 1 hour - this includes putting each image into all applicable subcategories of 5 main categories (location, subject, image quality, process, and things in the picture).
The reason I can categorize this fast is that the tag selection is a tree with checkboxes. I select an image or images, then click on the appropriate checkboxes, then press a key to move to the next image. Each image takes only a few seconds to tag, and there is no wasted time and energy right-clicking to bring up an unnecessary dialog, and navigating down into the hierarchy of tags to find the right tags to assign (by which time I may well have forgotten the context of what I was doing)

None of the current Free Software Image Database programs (that is what I call this type of program) meets my needs at the current time, and most seem to be headed in the wrong direction by adding unneeded features like rotation and editing (that many other programs do well) at the expense of the single most important feature - quick categorization (which no Free Software does well yet).

Too slow - are you sure?

Posted Apr 21, 2005 14:26 UTC (Thu) by wjhenney (guest, #11768) [Link]

The reason I can categorize this fast is that the tag selection is a tree with checkboxes. I select an image or images, then click on the appropriate checkboxes, then press a key to move to the next image.

How is this different from how digikam works? This sounds like a perfect description of what you get when you choose "Edit Comments & Tags" from the context menu. You get a persistent window with a big thumbnail of the current image, a text box to write comments in, and a tree view of all your tags with check boxes. Alt-B and Alt-F move you to previous and next image, respectively. You may be right that kimdaba can't do this (I haven't checked) but I think you should do more research before making sweeping comments like "None of the current Free Software Image Database programs ... meets my needs at the current time". Yeah, I know: there's so many of the damn things and life is short :)

re: Digikam Edit Comments

Posted Apr 21, 2005 21:06 UTC (Thu) by abredon (guest, #2038) [Link]

>How is this different from how digikam works? This sounds like a perfect description of what you get when you choose "Edit Comments & Tags" from the context menu.

I hadn't seen that dialog, and it is significantly better than what most of the other Free Software programs provide, but it takes 1 second to change from image to image in that dialog. Imatch takes under 1/10 second to change images, and I can select multiple images and skip from image to image out of order if I want. Also, the only thing I can do in the (modal) Edit Comments & Tags dialog is edit comments and tags. In IMatch's (non-modal) Category Assignments window, I can be assigning tags, notice that one image needs rotating, rotate it and continue assigning tags. I can then see that another image is completely ruined, delete it and continue assigning tags, all without losing my chain of thought.

Digikam is much better than the other Free options (and is on a par with many commercial programs - I consider it equivalent to Picasa, for example), but is still nowhere near good enough for what I need - the user interface gets in my way. With IMatch, I can sit down for 15 minutes before going to bed, and quickly categorize 300-400 images. When the Free programs get close to that point (i.e. when I can sit down and classify 50-100 programs without losing my train of thought), I will switch.

pity

Posted Apr 19, 2005 14:12 UTC (Tue) by havoc (guest, #2261) [Link]

Mr. Grumpy,

I am not much of a writer, but I try. I have started a "Defensive Users' Guide" to KimDaBa, which I hope to be able to submit to you. My hope is that "DU's" of the other programs mentioned here will also submit DUGs to you. I think it would be enlightening to see how users familiar with the software differ from your overview of a class of software. We, as users, have the advantage of familiarity, time and focus. My goal is to be non evangelistic about the software, but informative. I think a DUG would be an interesting counterpoint to your wonderful "Grumpy Editor's" pieces.