Can you define a use case for multiple databases?  The purpose of KPA is to make it easy to aggregate all of your images and then find whatever you're looking for quickly.  If you really need to segment your images, you can put them in different folders and then drill into the desired set using the folders category.  Does that not accomplish the same goal?

I will have to implement this feature anyway for the SQL backend. Converting data from XML to SQL requires two different databases to be open at the same time, so it needs multiple database support.

With SQL backend there are more use cases too: Having separate image collections on different servers for example.

CCing Jesper back so that people watching him get mail notifications.

Hi,

I wanted to file a new feature request but I'll see if what I'm requesting falls under this category.

I agree with Comment #1 about keeping simplicity. That's exactly what the goal of kphotoalbum is. I see only one difficulty currently. Say if I have images in folder A and videos in folder B and the database backend was created with the path "Folder A", then I don't see a clean and simple way of telling KPA to keep an eye on "Folder B".

What I'm simply requesting for is Amarok's library management.
In Amarok, I can specify multiple folders at different locations telling amarok that all of them contain music and that it should monitor all those folders for activity.

Can we have this feature ? It'd be great.

Thanks, Ritesh

Please almost never hesitate to file a feature request (a wishlist in this bug tracker vocabulary) :), because anyway, the entered so called bug are then to be sorted and readed. So, they'll be reput in the right category if needed.

So, to sum up. Please file a separate bug so as not to mix things with the current bug. 

Thanks.

Actually this is report is likely what Ritesh would like to see. As a quick workaround befoer KPA supprts that, you can always add a sylink "videos" to directory A pointing to directory B.

I guess this sits here waiting for the SQL backend to mature?

I would also like to see different databases. Simply one database per base diectory. If one defines multiple base directories, KPA should simply ask which one to use at startup. This won't address the issue described in comment #4, but if one has e. g. a "private" and a "business" collection or so, it would be cool to have multiple selectable base directories.

I keep my photos on a usb disk that is often not mounted.  I'd like KPhotoAlbum to be able to use a directory on my local disk *and* be able to (automatically) access the usb drive when it's present.  This should be implemented in some way so that KPA doesn't "thrash" my index files by deleting all the entries for pictures on the usb drive when it's not there and then adding them all back in when it is mounted.  Maybe the file tree (or whatever the internal data structure is) could have certain branches marked as "remote" so that they get ignored when they're not there and used when they are.

I have exactly the same issue with Amarok.

Here is a usecase for multiple databases:

We use Kphotoalbum within a family of 5 users.  The setup is multiple PCs and a central server where the /home dir sits.  Everybody sees the same files independent of the PC he/she is sitting at.

Everybody has its own album to keep large "gifts" (eg. a CD with images from a school outing) from crowding our family album.
Additionally we keep a shared family album where the good images from everybody go (copy via import/export).  This is where we look for pictures to show/print.
I even keep several albums: one for digital fotos (~20k images, tagged with KPA since 2005), one for my slide scans (~10k)

The various albums are used by more or less everybody.  Therefore we use rw-rw---- permissions for all files and the ownership of files vary inside one dir.  This is messy but OK for us.

I would greatly appreciate a solution that would make the cumbersome export/import step unnecessary.  
It would be nice to be able to share or reconcile category names and image tags between databases (our tags tend to diverge).

[[Did you know, that the WAF of KPA ist really good?  Firefox, Thunderbird, Office, Kphotoalbum]]

Thanks for a very elaborate email.

To be honest, I'm afraid your usecase is so specific that you will find it 
difficult to find any developers with the same need (which unfortunately is 
what drives development)

Just in case you don't know, you can use different databases by specifying the 
-c option to KPA: kphotoalbum -c private_colleciton.xml

Cheers