Too slow - are you sure? [LWN.net]

Too slow - are you sure?

Posted Apr 21, 2005 14:26 UTC (Thu) by wjhenney (guest, #11768)
In reply to: Too slow by abredon
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

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 :)

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re: Digikam Edit Comments

Posted Apr 21, 2005 21:06 UTC (Thu) by abredon (subscriber, #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.