Version: 0.10.0 (using KDE 4.2.2) OS: Linux Installed from: Ubuntu Packages I rely almost exclusively on tagging to organise images. (My album folders are just organised by year and month.) My typical workflow is to import a load of new images, select the relevant month folder, view my tag hierarchy in the right-hand panel and start selecting and tagging images in large chunks. For example, I may have taken 100 images at a particular location, so I select all of those images and assign my "Places/<Country>/<City>" tag. Then I might have an "Event/Wedding/John & Jane" tag that I want to apply to most of those images. This is where I notice a problem at times. In digiKam 0.9.x, I used to have problem if I changed the selection while the previous tag was (slowly) being applied to lots of images. It used to assign the old tag to the newly selected images, etc. This seems to be fixed in 0.10.0, or at least I haven't noticed it yet. Thanks. In digiKam 0.10.0 (and less often in 0.9.x), I have a different problem: when I change the selected images, the tag hierarchy on the right is sometimes disabled (greyed out and not responding to clicks). I often need to deselect and re-select one of the images to enable the tag hierarchy again. Yesterday, this happened on every second or third change of the selection. I haven't yet noticed any clear pattern and cannot reproduce it at will. I remember some bug or blog posting from Gilles where he mentioned that there is a distinction between the current image and the selected images (the thumbnail for the current image has the dotted outline, those for the the selected images have a blue background). Maybe it was bug #141940. I wonder if this distinction is related to my problem. Maybe what happens is that there are selected images but no current image, so the tag hierarchy is disabled and I cannot apply tags to the selected image. This whole current/selected image thing is very confusing. There is nothing about it in the user manual and I cannot understand how it can be useful. Bug #141940 mentions that it is consistent with the icon view in Konqueror, but that doesn't really help.
I recommend to test using current code from svn (0.11.0), to see if problem is reproducible. It sound like a signl/slots connection is missing, or it's a race condition. Marcel currently working to rewritte whole icon-view implementation using QT4 model/view. A lots of code will be updated/changed/re-written. In 0.10, we still use Qt4 porting classes with iconview. Gilles Caulier
AFAIR greying out of tags hierarchy is method to prevent selection and assigning of new tags until all previous operations are done. I was doing testing for fixind of bug you mentioned and after several tries developers decided to this "brute force" solution as only one really working.
I've been using 1.0.0-beta5 for a while and this issue is not as prevalent there. It still happens from time-to-time, but mostly the greyed out tags are enabled again once the previously selected tags have been applied to all selected images. In 0.10.0, they remained disabled far too often. I'll continue to keep an eye on this. If I can find an easy way to reproduce it, I'll report back.
Scratch my last comment. This is just as bad in 1.0.0-beta5 as it ever was on the older versions. If I select lots of images, apply a tag and, while the tag is being applied, change the selection, then the tags are greyed out and, even after the original tagging task is complete, they are not enabled until I change the selection again. When tagging lots of images, this means that I often have to make my selection twice, which tends to lead to a lot of swearing!
I have a correction to my last comment: the tags are not greyed out until AFTER the previous tagging operation completes. For example, if I select 50 images and then click on, say, the "Place/X" tag and then click on the first image for the next tag "Place/Y", then the first "Place/X" tag will be applied to the first 50 images (which is just how I like it) and the first of the next set of images will appear selected. While those images are being tagged (which may take a few seconds), the tags are NOT greyed out. It is only when the tagging completes that the tags become greyed out. I then have to select something other than the first image for the "Place/Y" tag and then select that first image again. Could it be that the condition that is supposed to grey out the tags while tagging is in progress and then "un-grey" then when it completes is working the wrong way around? Is it "un-greying" them at the start (when they are already in that state) and then greying them out at the end?
I've let a lot of photos build up over the past few months and finally got around to tagging them today. This is the first time I've used 1.2.0 for anything more than a bit of browsing. This particular problem with the disabling of the tag tree is worse in 1.2.0 than in any previous version I have used. For whatever reason, DigiKam seems very sluggish today; maybe that is why more than half of the time this happens from the main browsing window: 1. I select some photos (that have never been tagged before), say about ten of them. I click the first thumbnail image (well, the box around the image) and then Shift-click the last image to select the range. 2. I check a couple of tags in the tag tree in the right-hand panel. 3. I click the next image I want to tag. This starts to apply the tags set in 2. to the images selected in 1. At this point the tag tree is still enabled. I just select one image, though selecting a range will have the same effect. 4. I start to move the mouse from the image towards the tag tree to select a new tag. While I am on my way over there, the tag tree will suddenly become disabled, just as if I has not selected any images. 5. I deselect the image from 3. and select it again. Now the tag tree is enabled and I can select a new image. So, more than half the time, I have to select images twice to make sure that the tag tree is enabled. Here is my theory: While DigiKam is applying tags to images in the background, it was designed to disable the tag tree and then enable it when the tagging was complete. However, it is doing it backwards: it is enabling the tree when it starts and disabling it when it finishes. Some sort of Boolean flag is being applied incorrectly. OK, it's just a theory with no evidence to support it other than the observed behaviour of the GUI. However, the fact that the tag tree is enabled while I am making my second selection and then suddenly appears disabled for no other apparent reason would seem to suggest that it is caused by the background task that is applying the tags to the previously selected images. Anyway, it's bugging the proverbial out of me today, so I thought I would write it up at great length...again.
Just been doing more tagging since the last update. I can reproduce this problem 100% of the time. However, if I consciously delay making the new selection, it helps to make it less annoying: 1. Select images, tag them. 2. Select first image in new range. Tagging of images from 1. will start in the background. 3. WAIT UNTIL THE TAG TREE IS GREYED OUT WHEN THE TAGS IN 1. HAVE BEEN APPLIED. 4. Now that the tag tree is greyed out, select the last image in the new range. This acts to enable the tree again without having to make unnecessary selections. There is still a problem if the new range has only one image, or if I forget to delay the selection of the the last image when there are multiple images in the new range.
Sorry for going on, but I forgot to mention that this problem does not occur if I hit the "Apply" button in the tag panel. It only happens if I allow the tags to be applied automatically when I change selection, which is the way I prefer to work (though I think I'll have to change that preference).
Just tried with 2.0 SVN, cannot reproduce the problem.
Ancient bug. Feel free to reopen is reproducible with a 2.x version.