Ins and Outs of Inputs

I have been using Digikam for managing my photos for some time. It's pretty neat software and development is progressing quite fast. You can think of it as Lightroom, just without the neat non-destructive editing. But that is coming too, thanks to Google and another round of Summer of Code participants. But I wouldn't be writing this blog post if Digikam was flawless would I? :-)

First I'll describe my work-flow in few short bullet-points :-)

• Shoot a LOT of photos
• Delete almost as many photos
• Geotag, tag/keyword and rate remaining photos
• If it was party or something similar upload to Facebook right away
• Pick few photos and improve them a bit with Gimp (nothing fancy, just crop/levels)
• Upload all photos to Flickr as a backup/sharing place
  

Digikam enables me to work like this, except the last point. Why? Because apparently Digikam developers don't think anyone would update their photos to Flickr without first resizing/recompressing them. This  how flickr export dialog looks like this:


See the problem? Even if I don't chose "Resize photos before uploading" Digikam will still re-compress them which is a Really-Bad-Thing(tm) to do with jpeg files. I had some previous experience with Qt3 and even Qt4. so I though it might be a good idea to look into fixing this small annoyance. I will not bore you with the details how I checked out svn repository with git and rest of the stuff. Here is the result:


If you un-check "Send original file (no resizing)" original settings will appear and you can resize/recompress as much as you want (Blasphemy! Madness!). The patch is not flawless, because it won't prevent you from trying to upload RAW files to Flickr, but it's good enough for me :-) It's not even that big, stats are like this:

 flickrexport/flickrtalker.cpp |   18 ++++++++++++------
 flickrexport/flickrtalker.h   |    2 +-
 flickrexport/flickrwidget.cpp |   34 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------
 flickrexport/flickrwidget.h   |    5 +++++
 flickrexport/flickrwindow.cpp |    4 ++++
 flickrexport/flickrwindow.h   |    1 +
 6 files changed, 49 insertions(+), 15 deletions(-)

You can download the patch from my Dropbox for now until the bugreport I created some time ago will get sorted out (don't hold your breath too much though). The patch applies cleanly across all versions of kipi-plugins I tried (from 0.8.something to 1.4.0). Happy uploading.