It rocks that a new album can be added simply by creating a folder and puting some images in it. What would top that off is if initial meta data (album name, description, etc) could be read from a meta.txt (or similar) file from the same directory.

The reasononing is that I'm working on an offline tool I use to organize my photos and quickly upload them via FTP into directories. I would love to be able to stick a little text file in the new directory so that the new album is fully polished and then I wouldn't need to visit the admin page to fix it up.

I guess it might be easiest just to use the file to get information if there is nothing in the database. Then if the information is changed in the admin page, those changes go in the database and the file is ignored.

Most important to me would be album name, album description, and which image to use for the main thumnail. Others might also like to be able to add names and descriptions to individual files, but I don't generally take the time to name and describe each photo

I actually thought of this, and it's on the list already. Good to know someone thinks it might be useful.

The way it'll work is exactly as you've described. When a new image (or album) is detected, it'll look for a text file and the filename, and grab metadata from there. After that everything is from the database.

I like this idea also. I would even go so far as to say that data for each individual photo could be read from the txt file.

One thing I could see this useful for is for making some way to export photos from digikam to zenphoto. I think the sqlite database that digikam uses could be easily exported to a text file with comments etc.

After looking into it, it would be 100% possible to make a bash script or even maybe a simple command that uses the command line sqlite interface to read photo meta data from the digikam image database (its called digikam3.db in the root folder of your albums directory) and make a text file that should be suitable for parsing and finding metadata by zenphoto.

I really know almost nothing about SQL, sqlite, or php, or anything like that, but I think as long as the text file to be read looked for a separator that was defined (the standard one is a pipe "|") or possibly for html tables, or anything in between, as long as it is able to match the filename with the image caption.

Maybe this could be the beginning of a digikam plugin for the export of albums to zenphoto (a batch process of uploading photos and a metadata text file via ftp). If I knew anything about programming I would write it myself, unfortunately I am not.

Does anyone else use both digikam and zenphoto?