[Shotwell] Consider using Taglist to handle metadata?

[bjoern at gruenings.eu]

Hi Adam,

thank you for your answer.

<snip>

> 1. Integrate with Tracker so that any photo captions, keywords or
> descriptions entered in Shotwell are searchable via Tracker if the user
> has
> Tracker installed.
>
> 2. Use Tracker rather than SQLite for storing photo captions/keywords
> (and,
> perhaps, other state such as the edits made to each photo) in Shotwell.
>
> I think that (1) would be useful, and we have a ticket for this (
> http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1890).  In fact, (1) might come entirely for
> free if we decide to write out photo metadata to photo files on the fly,
> which is a possibility the team is currently considering (perhaps as a
> user
> option like in F-Spot).  Then if Tracker is running it can index the photo
> metadata and it will be searchable.
>
> (2) would mean that Shotwell would depend on Tracker: it would only be
> possible to use Shotwell if Tracker were already running.  We're reluctant
> to require this dependency, as some major distributions (e.g. Ubuntu) do
> not
> install Tracker by default and we want to be part of the default install.
> It's also not clear what additional benefits (2) would have over (1) to
> the
> user, so this is not under consideration at this time.

(2) would bring several advantages over (1) imho.
- You get tagging for free. Photos tagged in gnome-shell or nautilus will
share the same tags as in shotwell, they are reachable from everywhere.
- You get write-back support for free.
- Photos from online archives (flickr, facebook at al) indexed with metadata
- integration with contacts (telepathy)
- you get a few tickets closed as monitoring photo dir
- metadata extraction for free and a common code base

I don't understand why depend on tracker is such a big no go. Tracker does
not need to be running all the time. You can monitor only one dir and
disable tracker for the rest of the Desktop (you still get the taging from
every application feature). In these case tracker is just an dependency as
sqlite (btw. tracker uses sqlite).
Ubuntu ships tracker by default since a few years[1] (unfortunatly the old
0.6 branch, these branch has nothing in todo with the 0.8/0.9 branch).
Tracker is havily used in Meego and will be part of gnome-shell, is also
an external dependency from gnome (since 2.30).

kind regards,
Bjoern

[1] it was for Intrepid Ibex and Hardy Heron, since Jaunty Jackalope its
disabled, because 0.8 came to late



> adam
>