Re: Idea: several databases as albums

[f-spot mbx zapto org]

Antti Ahonen wrote:
> There have been some talk about possible album features in F-spot. I 
> do not know anything about programming, so correct me if I am wrong, 
> but could it be done this way:
>
> Photos.db file is kind of an album itself, so if we would have for 
> example photos1.db, photos2.db and so on we would have several albums. 
> So minimum chances required in the program would be a startup menu, 
> where you could choose your database, or start a new one, and in the 
> program a possibility to export photos to another database.
>
> So this way I could have a main database with all pictures,  and also  
> separate  databases for different subjects, like "Work", "Family" and 
> so on.
>
> The reason I suggest using the photos.db file as an album, instead of 
> making virtual albums inside one database is because I have had some 
> serious performance problems myself with larger databases. I use older 
> machines, and have relatively large archive, so from my experience I 
> would say that it gets rather slow to work over 80000 pictures, and 
> very slow round 130000. So with separate databases, I could always 
> work with reasonably sized database and have all operations running 
> nice and smooth.
>
> Before you reply that nobody has that many pictures, and everybody has 
> newer machines, I must point out that if you take digital pictures, 
> you propably will end up having a lot of those at some point, it might 
> take years thought. And about the machines, many people who have older 
> machines are starting to use linux, because new windows programs do 
> not run in those anymore.
>
> And there are other advantages of this system as well, like if I need 
> to show some specific pictures to somebody, like family-pictures to 
> relatives, I could use all the F-spots search etc. features without 
> having to go through all the other image material I have on my database.
>
> Well let me know what you think, I thought it might be a good idea.
I think this is a good idea for other reasons as well.  For example. I 
might have pictures that are personal and then pictures that I would 
like to share with my family for example, where my family would use the 
same computer.  Or perhaps I have pictures that I take as a professional 
and pictures taken of family and friends.

I think there might be a command line parameter for this already.  Can 
anybody verify?  Is this what -basedir does?

Well even if there is, it would be nice to put this into the UI so it 
can be changed without restarting and without looking up parameters and 
re-starting the app.