Use case: Need for virtual albums

Software digiKam
1

Hi,
I have the following personal use case:

Photos of the same event are in different albums (i.e. physical folders of my HDD).
Can these photos be displayed as the same event?

1.) I shoot photos in RAW with a “real” camera and also JPEG with my smartphone.
2.) I copy the files from both my smartphone and my camera onto my HDD
3.) My folder structure on my HDD is ~/home/photos/event1 for the photos (JPEGs) of my smartphone.
The RAW files from my camera go into ~/home/photos/camera/event1
4.) After importing these folders/files into digiKam 7 the album view shows the layout of the folder/files as they are on my HDD.
5.) Now both the JPEGS and the RAWs are in different folders on my HDD and correspondingly also in different albums in digiKam 7. But they are the same event and I want to display them as such!

Is there any method to achieve this by virtual folders or virtual collections or whatever you call them? Or are there other methods?

thx

1 Like
2

Perhaps you want a Collection, which is 1 or more Albums.

3

Thanks @paperdigits . But how does it work? Creating one more album where all the files from the two folders go in means duplicate files, doesn’t it?

4

You can also use tags: Digikam albums are actually folders, so where are the collections/albums? - #3 by rasimo

The docs on collections are here: https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/extragear-graphics/digikam/using-digikam.html

1 Like
5

I just started using geeqie’s Collections; the are a text file that contains a list of file paths:

#Geeqie collection
#created with Geeqie version 1.5.1
#geometry: 77 100 440 450
"/home/glenn/Pictures/2012/2012-09 Wine Cruise/Day 8 - Medoc/DSC_2755.JPG"
"/home/glenn/Pictures/2012/2012-09 Wine Cruise/Day 8 - Medoc/DSC_2841.JPG"
"/home/glenn/Pictures/2012/2012-09 Wine Cruise/Day 8 - Medoc/DSC_2848.JPG"
"/home/glenn/Pictures/2012/2012-09 Wine Cruise/Day 9 - La Guardia/DSC_2924.JPG"
"/home/glenn/Pictures/2012/2012-05-10 NYC Trip/DSC_0748.JPG"
#end

What geeqie does with that file is to open a window that looks just like a file browser, with thumbnails of the images listed. You then have a right-click pop-up menu on each thumbnail that lets you do a variety of things to that image, except to actually delete the original.

This to me is the essential implementation of anything called “collection” - a list of pointers to original images that can be used like a directory of the images, for the most part…

2 Likes
6

I was hoping that Geeqie was a plug-in of some kind to digiKam, but it seems to be this stand-alone tool, right?

Apart from the not-so-sexy interface, Geeqie is conceptually what one is after, but I guess it would be made up of image ids rather than actual file paths, in order for it to be possible to move between computers or share the database between OS’s.

Collections and Smart Collections are a necessity in my book. Wondering if it is possible to piggy-back on the Search View … Smart Collections are essentially just saved searches, so the hardest work has been done, but it leaves quite a bit of fiddly UI work, which is never fun.

1 Like
7

Yes, it is a stand alone tool.