Re: Basic questions on indexing of images

[Jon Trowbridge <trow novell com>]

On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 22:58 +0100, Kristian Berg wrote:
> I'm adding a
> F-SpotQueryable in beagled who (in theory) will open f-spot's photo
> database using Mono.Data.SqliteClient and get all tags and all photos
> with those tags. The idea is that you can search for "birthday 2005" and
> all photos who have been tagged with birthday 2005 in f-spot will show
> up.

As an enthusiastic user of f-spot, I would love to see better
beagle/f-spot integration.  I don't know if a separate FSpotQueryable is
the right way to go.  Since f-spot stores photos on the file system,
they will already get indexed by the FileSystemQueryable.  Thus the
FileSystemQueryable seems like the reasonable point of integration.

At one point I did a crude hack to index f-spot data, but it is
currently disabled.  (The code is still in beagled/FilteredIndexable.cs,
but it is #if false/#endif-ed out.)  It seems to me that there are two
reasonable ways to approach this problem, but both have problems:

The first approach is the one I used: basically attaching the f-spot
metadata to the file when it is indexed.  That let's you search the
f-spot metadata for free, but there would have to be a way to keep the
lucene index up-to-date if the f-spot db is changed.  If you can get
fine-grained notification of f-spot db changes, this would probably be
the way to go.  If not, it might be hard.

The second approach would be to do a separate search of the f-spot
metadata at query-time, and then both adding the matching files to the
list of hits that comes out of the lucene index and attaching the
necessary metadata to the hits before the are passed on to the client.
Some of the infrastructure to do stuff like this is already written, and
should land in CVS soon.  But it also requires us to search the f-spot
database ourselves, which could introduce other problems.  One option
would be for f-spot to maintain a small lucene index for its tags, but
Larry might not like that idea.  And getting notification of changes is
still a problem.

> Hope I'm not wasting your time with these questions...

Definitely not.  I hope the above helps.

Good luck,
-J