Digikam/GSoC2010/NonDestructiveEditing

 Expected results:

Define a format to store editing operations - research existing standards or similar free software approaches, or come up with a home-made XML format.

Adapt the existing image plugins to read and write their settings from this XML format and to re-apply a described operation to a given image (this is a laborious but relatively easy task)

work together with your mentor on storing version history in digikam's database and the image's metadata. (this is needed to finish the project, but it's not the core of the student's work). Set up a simple file naming scheme to store the original and derived files.

Implement the user interface changes: No more Save/Save As in the image editor. Instead, saving as current version, forking a new version, or exporting. Stacks of images (original/current version) in the album icon view.

Build a widget to display version history. Optionally this is a really nice widget, a tree view with buttons to show information. Optionally there is also support to take a set of applied changes, store it and apply it to a different image.