Author Topic: Pictures - improvements to browsing and tagging  (Read 4791 times)

sambuca

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Pictures - improvements to browsing and tagging
« on: October 26, 2013, 10:55:05 pm »
Hi all,

(This post is both to inform of recent changes, but also to ask for future direction regrading picture support)

I've recently been working on improving LMCE support for picture handling. I started with a ticket on trac, including code originally made by "chriss", modifying this, and adding that to updatemedia. Now LMCE will load and store a couple of attributes to and from picture files, most notably the keyword attribute. (but title, manufacturer and date is also supported, but not used in LMCE).
Also:
The orbiter is updated to browse images by keyword.
The screensaver page has been modified to do ajax/real-time updates of keywords and screensaver attributes. (no need to press 'save' at the bottom of the page)

So far so good.. I'm fairly pleased with the result so far. My goal all along has been to make it easy to add (and remove) keywords. This is achieved by using ajax and an all-keyboard approach to adding keywords.

But I'm not done yet. And that is where you come in. I already have some ideas, but I haven't decided 100% yet, so this is your chance to share your thoughts  :)

My current ideas are support for:
* changing the exif orientation of the picture from the screen saver/picture manager page (I have a camera that does not store any exif orientation data, so all pictures not taken in the cameras normal position will be displayed wrong - the file is missing the rotation to correct this, but only for image viewers that support it of course)
* share album/keyword as a folder on the local network. This idea arise from the need to use images in other programs, after being tagged. Say you tag all your Christmas photos in LMCE, and want to send all those to your grandmother, or import them into a photo-book program. Well, once you have done that in LMCE, you should not have to categorize them again in some other program or add them file by file in your email program.
The basic idea is to define some filter to get the files you want, and to make them available in a folder on the network. (This would also be possible to extend to other files types like audio and video, but that is another idea ;) )

I will have to mention that these changes are done in 1204, if you are on 1004, you'll have to wait ;)

So, what do you miss, what do you want, what do you prefer, etc... I have left out some details in my post to make it short, but just add what you want, and I'll consider it!

best regards,
sambuca
« Last Edit: October 26, 2013, 11:00:17 pm by sambuca »

golgoj4

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Re: Pictures - improvements to browsing and tagging
« Reply #1 on: October 26, 2013, 11:32:29 pm »
Thoughts on this include

being able to sync with external photo services? Both add them to the pss and sync them to the service.

I kinda like the keywords concept since it make it easier to group, maybe with some supplemental tagging for people or pictures of note within the set.


Thanks for doing this!
-golgoj4
Linuxmce - Where everyone is never wrong, but we are always behind xbmc in the media / ui department.

sambuca

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Re: Pictures - improvements to browsing and tagging
« Reply #2 on: October 26, 2013, 11:51:21 pm »
External sync:
* several photo services (including google) supports keywords. The PSS (photo screen saver) is a separate attribute and does not get stored in the file (haven't found a suitable exif attribute).
* I know some windows specification describes another way to tag persons, so that could be implemented if we wanted to....

br,
sambuca