Version: (using KDE KDE 3.5.7) Installed from: Gentoo Packages If you enter something into the taggingwindow (e.g into the locationsearchbar) the search-as-you-type function in kphotoalbum does only search from the beginning of the string. Like a "^<the-stuff-you-type>" regexp. That means that if you have a name like "qodkemthellolkdj" and you enter "hello" it doesn't find anything.
I think that this is not a bug, but a feature. Suppose you have a list of people, probably pretty long. You know that there's "Jim Brown" on the current picture, but you can't remember right now what you use as a tag name for him -- is he "jim", "jimmy", or "jim brown"? Typing "j" limits the view to names starting with that letter, which is very useful, IMHO, and you don't want that to match "andrej", for exmaple. However, if someone disagrees, please feel free to reopen this bug.
I agree on that case. But if you are tagging photos of a conference with people you know only by last name (assuming you got the first names from a list or so), the priciple doesn't work. My biggest problem is that I have a "Jacob B*", a "Jacob S*" and a "Jacob Z*". Another example is "Janina" and "Janine". Or "Julia" and "Julius". First letters are suboptimal in these cases. So imho the behavior should at least be changeable.
Well, quick search feature is designed to do quick search only. It has obvious limitation, due to some choices that are the one we think are the best for general cases. But please keep in mind that this feature should stay as simple as possible. In fact, if you want to search more precisely, then the search dialog is what you should use. And please also note that if you want to make it configurable, best is to propose a patch for this showing how you'd like and come to discuss it on the mailing list. This is the only way if you want that your feature be included in KPhotoAlbum: convince current users/developers :-).
Note that the list box of all available people etc in the annotation dialog can be sorted in the most-recently-used way. This might help you. Closing per comments #1 and #3.