[KPhotoAlbum] KPA & continuity - life after us..

[Risto H. Kurppa]

Hi,

Andreas wrote some days ago a message about 'rough edges' of KPA. Maybe a
bit related to that some thoughts.

I run KPA on Ubuntu. My backups are on ext3/4 disks. The photos are
valuable and I'd like to see them being available for - generations to come.

If something happens to me - how will my family be able to find the images?
The files can be found on backup disks. I've marked the backup USB drives
with "ext3/4" on permanent marker :D so an ext3/4 reader for Windows should
do the trick. But to get to KPA tags etc ie. setting up KPA & Linux/stuff
will be much more harder and unlike to happen.

One thouhgt I had was to store the tags as EXIF/IPTC on the files to allow
them to be read with any program existing decades later, if the hardware
interfaces & ext fs is still known (and JPG & RAW formats...)


Has anyone of you thought this somehow? How will your photos be used after
you're gone?




r

[Johannes Zarl-Zierl]

Hi,

[Disclaimer: I'm slowly wading through my email backlog, please be patient]

Post by Risto H. Kurppa
If something happens to me - how will my family be able to find the images?
The files can be found on backup disks. I've marked the backup USB drives
with "ext3/4" on permanent marker :D so an ext3/4 reader for Windows should
do the trick. But to get to KPA tags etc ie. setting up KPA & Linux/stuff
will be much more harder and unlike to happen.
One thouhgt I had was to store the tags as EXIF/IPTC on the files to allow
them to be read with any program existing decades later, if the hardware
interfaces & ext fs is still known (and JPG & RAW formats...)

Last time I checked, EXIF/IPTC is not well equipped to carry this kind of
information.

From a pure data preservation standpoint, the pseudo-xml format we currently
use should be parseable for a Long Time(tm). While this is nice for a
professional archival entity, it won't help your family after you've passed
on.

Post by Risto H. Kurppa
Has anyone of you thought this somehow? How will your photos be used after
you're gone?

I have thought about this a little, but not that much. In my family, I'm the
only one tagging my images in any way. If I'm gone, my family will probably
search photos the old way.



Btw. you don't have to die to make this a valid use-case. If several people in
the family use photo management software, how can they exchange data?

If we cannot put the info into EXIF/XMP/IPTC, could we put it into a side-car
file?

If a consensus could be reached (maybe as open-desktop standard?), importing/
exporting tags to side-car files or similar is something I definitely would
want to support.

Cheers,
Johannes

P.S.: For digikam/kphotoalbum, this may also be tackled using a kipi plugin
(although the kipi api seems to get less and less usable over time...)