I have OpenSUSE 12.2, KDE. I am accumulating a large number of images (mostly jpg’s, but some png’s) which are mostly Creative-Commons-licensed. For each image I need to keep track of who needs to be credited, and which type of license I have it under. Ideally, the file manager (I use Dolphin, but could use another) would, when I right-click, offer me a free-text field in which I could record this data at the time I obtain the image. But I cannot find any way to do this with Dolphin (nor Konqueror nor Krusader), and instead I have to open the file with Gwenview and work thru submenus to add the information I need.
I would appreciate knowing whether there’s any file manager or add-on which I could use to readily record a few dozen characters of text information with a simple right-click. (btw, it would be immaterial whether this is in the EXIF field or elsewhere). From this old thread I infer that three years ago there was nothing available.
In case you have a lot of JPEG file where you want to put the same information, it is of course not that clever to use a GUI interface at all. Such dumb work is typicaly to be done by a CLI command (in the batch when needed). Have a look at jhead (the package jhead is on the OSS repo).
This works fine when you have to add “License: Creative Commons” to all pics. As soon as the info to add can differ for each pic, I’d rather use a GUI, to be precise “what farcusz said”
Yes, that’s just what I want to do. How does one get Dolphin to do that? Mine doesn’t offer those options As illustrated here (and the “configure” link at bottom only seems to relate to standard metadata fields such as image dimensions, not tags nor text)
So if I could get my Dolphin to work like yours I think I’d have what I need.
(Mass changes via command line won’t work since each image has a unique credit, and there are several kinds of CC licenses)
what version of KDE are you using? When you click configure is there not an option to check either “comment” or “tag”?
I’m using KDE 4.9.xx so I guess it is possible that this is a new feature that was added to the newer version of KDE.
Even so, you can access exactly the same fields (comment or tag) in Gwenview with fewer clicks than Dolphin (as illustrated above).
KDE is 4.8.5. Looking at the instructions for upgrading to 4.9 I conclude that I might upgrade successfully, or otherwise. I don’t see a way to edit tags from the browse function in Gwenview (2.8.5), perhaps it is using a KDE 4.9 capability? I think my best strategy is to muddle thru using the Gwenview plugin, then try again when OpenSUSE 12.3 is available. Thanks all the same for your advice.
Browsing around elsewhere I found an indication here that Dolphin stores its tags and comments with Nepomuk. I had long ago disabled Nepomuk because it didn’t seem to be doing anything useful to me (more about Nepomuk is here). I started it up about ten hours ago; it is still crunching along but Dolphin now offers me the tag and comment fields, just as farcusnz showed from his system. Thanks for showing me it is possible.
And when those comments are going into Nepomuk, they are not going into the JPEG files. And that last thing is what the OP asked for. Nice misunderstanding
Hm rereading your original question, it is not clear what you asked for.
You said
For each image I need to keep track of who needs to be credited, and which type of license I have it under. I
Which indeed can be done putting that information somewhere on your system while being logicaly connected to your file. And that is what Nepomuk seems to provide (I do not use it).
But then you tried to use Gwenview,which does not put it elsewhere on the system, but uses the fact that JPEG files may contain comment. Thus it is in the file. Rather logical to me that file managers in general do not cover this. Because users/I then would demand from a file manager that it could do this in many types of files, not only JPEG, and not only Graphical ones. And that would go far beyond the task of a file manager IMHO.
> But then you tried to use Gwenview,which does not put it elsewhere on
> the system, but uses the fact that JPEG files may contain comment. Thus
> it is in the file. Rather logical to me that file managers in general
> do not cover this. Because users/I then would demand from a file manager
> that it could do this in many types of files, not only JPEG, and not
> only Graphical ones. And that would go far beyond the task of a file
> manager IMHO.
Not beyond the task of a jpg file manager
Or a photo manager.
Konqueror in kde3 had a lot of features. I would not be surprised if it
did that.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
I didn’t take portability to be a requirement in the original question.
But you are correct, if you want to maintain the information across different systems then your best option would be the metadata plugin included in Gwenview - although I’m not sure if there are any shortcuts to load it.
I did not specify portability, but I do need to be able to restore from backup. This thread indicates that I can’t just backup the Nepomuk data in the usual way. However, the “Desktop Search - KDE Control Module” for Nepomuk says “Nepomuk can perform regular automatic backups of all data that could not be restored otherwise. This includes manually created tags, ratings, but also statistical data.” This backup seems to be stored in .kde4/share/apps/nepomuk/backupsync/backups and the method for restoring is described here. However I haven’t actually tried it and the post is several years old.
Well, all that Nepomuk data is inside your home directory (more precisely inside your .kde4 directory). Thus restoring all of ~/.kde4 (I trust that you or your system manager, which may be you again, regularly make backups of all inside your home directory).will restore not only your KDE specific configurations, but also this metadata. When it is good enough for you to know that it is there and can be restored without you knowing exactly where and how (database structure?) then it could be OK.
But when you do not want to be dependent of KDE being able to show you this info for many years to come, I wouldn’t know if I was satisfied. But I have a bad experience with KDE Kaddressbook, that in it’s newest incarnation does not show/use Category tags that we painstakingly added to all our addresses over the years.
And when you want to be sure that the info travels with the file wherever it goes, you better use the feature of having comments in e.g. JPEG files. A feature that depends of course on the file type and is not granted to be available on all of them (even not the graphics ones).
