Version: 3.0.2 (using KDE KDE 3.5.8) Installed from: Debian testing/unstable Packages OS: Linux Applications like kphotoalbum are not useful without annotations to the data they use. And annotations to images and videos are a tedious task. I have more than a 1000 images and videos that were all annotated and today somehow I've lost all of them. The bad thing is that now I have to do everything from scratch, and for many of the images I might not remember every event. It would be good if kphotoalbum allows all annotations to images/videos be embedded to the data itself rather than maintaining it in a separate _single_ file. The current method has a single point of failure, a failure which if occurs causes huge pain in getting back. Having annotations embedded into the data also has the benefit that as a user I'd just require to copy my data to another box running kphotoalbum and use it with all the tags that I had set. Surely many people would not like this idea because it would add more cruft to the existing data and this wishlist will also not work for people who have their data on read-only medium. But please, please add this as an option so that many users like me don't have to worry about the tags we've set. I've already lost all the annotations that I'd set and I'm already feeling how painful it is going to be for me ahead. The richness of applications like kphotoalbum is only cherished when the data is intact with all its annotations. My images/videos tags all are gone. :-(
Now you have the IPTC export... But it doesn't remove the need to backup the photos, and particularly the index.xml file in our case, it's true. That's a file I often backup in some different places.
As a user, I didn't care to know how kphotoalbum was internally storing all the data. Only after the loss do I realise that it is a single file, a single failure point. I guess many other kpa users also don't know how it stores the tags. I haven't tried the export option, but having the mentioned wishlist as an option as "Embed all annotations to data" will be far more useful. And you already mentioned, export will be required to be done periodically.
At first, I wonder if you could be more specific about how that particular data loss occured. Second, KPA can be set to make backups of that critical file, should an error occur and it get damaged. Unfortunately this wasn't on by default, but it will be in 3.1.0. Those backups are stored as index.xml~number~.zip (with "number" being some number) in your image root. Third, there's a new feature called "Metadata export" that enabled writing metadata back to files. This is *not* meant for recovery purposes, but to enable easier sharing of metadata between various image tagging applications. It's also pretty new feature and as such it shouldn't be relied upon too much. It's recommended to test yourself if you can use it for such purposes. Fourth, and I'm sure you've already heard that (and I understand you might get upset by hearing that now when your data are gone), backups are crucial part of any serious work. If your hard drive fails, if your computer gets cracked, if you accidentally delete your files -- you will sooner or later need backups. It's said that people can be divided into two groups, those that have backups and those that haven't lost any data yet. *No* number of security measures can replace proper backup strategy (and storing backup media off-site). Thanks for your report.
SVN commit 728677 by jkt: Create 5 backup copies of index.xml by default BUG: 151250 M +1 -1 SettingsData.h WebSVN link: http://websvn.kde.org/?view=rev&revision=728677
Well. I guess I was lucky. I looked into Trash and found an index.xml there :-) What a real bad defalut name has been chosen, IMO. It would have been better named as KPA.xml or better ".KPA.xml". As to save myself, I've now created a hardlink of index.xml to KPhotoAlbum.xml Anyway, it is much relaxing to see that the file is intact and all is back to normal. And now I've enabled the incremental backups to 5. :-) I hope what you explained about "Metadata export" is about writing metadata back to the images/videos. Thank you for KPhotoAlbum. I still love it than any other similar app.