IntroductionTable of Contents
If you are like me you have thousands of images ever since you got your first camera, some taken with a normal camera other with a digital camera. Through all the years you believed that until eternity you would be able to remember the story behind every single picture, you would be able to remember the names of all the people on your images, and you would be able to remember the exact date of every single image. I personally realized that this was not possible anymore, and especially for my digital images - but also for my paper images - I needed a tool to help me describe my images, and to search in the pile of images. This is exactly what KPhotoAlbum is all about.
KPhotoAlbum focuses on three key points:
It must be easy to annotate a number of images at a time. It must for example not take more than a few mouse clicks to mark all your images from your holiday as being from Italy, 1992. KPhotoAlbum offers two ways of describing images: one at a time, which is useful for writing text about images, and All Simultaneously, which is useful for selecting a number of images, and setting properties like location, people on images, and date of image.
It must be easy to search for images. KPhotoAlbum offers to describe images with a number of properties. These includes date, people, places, plus a keyword field the user can use for custom keywords like Album 7 or Holiday trip to Italy. With KPhotoAlbum you can search for images in each of the categories - e.g. find all the images with Jesper on them from the holiday in Italy. It is of course possible to create your own categories, much more on that later.
It must be easy to browse and View the images. When viewing images, your focus often changes - one moment you are looking at images from your holiday in 1992, and when seeing an image of a friend whom you spent that holiday with, you focus suddenly changes, so you want to see all images of that friend.
In this manual I will take you through the steps of (1) annotating your images, (2) browsing and viewing images and (3) advanced topics and customization.
KPhotoAlbum started out as an application for managing your images, but since then it has been extended, so it today also takes care of your videos. In many places in this manual I will talk about images, but just as often the discussion does include videos.