Digikam/GSoC2012/PhotivoIntegration

Photivo Integration

digikam and Photivo are perfect complements: digiKam is the best photo management software I have ever known. The raw file developing tool Photivo offers a remarkable feature set, high quality of processing and an optimized workflow.

My motivation is to make digiKam and Photivo nicely integrate into each other in order to combine the best out of both applications.

Details

digiKam is the best photo management software I have ever known. In addition to its comprehensive management abilities it also provides image editing and processing features. Nevertheless there are are some tasks that can be done better by tools that are optimized for a special purpose. One of these tasks is the processing of raw image files. digiKam is able to develop raw files, but more experienced users tend to use specialized software that offer more options and detailed control but also demand some more knowledge (or at least the will to experiment around a bit).

Since a while there are some great open source raw developers. My favored tool is Photivo. It offers a remarkable feature set, high quality of processing and an optimized workflow, that suits its purpose. Although some of the filters aim at advanced users Photivo can also be used without knowledge what LAB and “all that stuff” even means and how it internally works.

Therefore my motivation is to make digiKam and Photivo nicely integrate into each other in order to combine the best out of both applications.

Lists

TODO

• Investigate: Which XMP properties should be used to map RAW and output file to each other? Possible ones are:
  • Dublin Core:
    • identifier
    • source
  • XMP Basic:
    • Identifier
    • => No property for source, therefore XMP Basic on its' own is not enough
  • XMP Media Management:
    • DerivedFrom
    • DocumentID
    • History (?)
    • InstanceID
    • VersionID
    • Versions (?)
    • => Most comprehensive schema, but special respect has to be taken on the Media Manager (if there's one)
  • Own solution
    • Wouldn't interefere with other systems
    • But also has no additional usage outside of Photivo
  • Does digiKam have special support for one schema?
    • Has internal IDs but doesn't seem to make the available somewhere
    • Versioning uses a XML format embedded into XMP (Xmp.digiKam.ImageHistory)
    • PicasaWeb and Yandex IDs are mapped into KIPI
  • Related:
    • Elvis: XMP relation creation
    • XMP Specification Part 1
    • Partners Guide to XMP for Dynamic Media

Reference and related links

• Proposal: Public, Non-Public

• digiKam

• Photivo