# Introduction

If you are like me you have thousands of images ever since you got your first camera, some taken with a normal camera other with a digital camera. Through all the years you believed that until eternity you would be able to remember the story behind every single picture, you would be able to remember the names of all the people on your images, and you would be able to remember the exact date of every single image. I personally realized that this was not possible anymore, and especially for my digital images - but also for my paper images - I needed a tool to help me describe my images, and to search in the pile of images. This is exactly what &kphotoalbum; is all about.

&kphotoalbum; focuses on three key points:

- It must be easy to annotate a number of images at a time. It must for example not take more than a few mouse clicks to mark all your images from your holiday as being from Italy, 1992. &kphotoalbum; offers two ways of describing images: one at a time, which is useful for writing text about images, and All Simultaneously, which is useful for selecting a number of images, and setting properties like location, people on images, and date of image.

- It must be easy to search for images. &kphotoalbum; offers to describe images with a number of properties. These includes date, people, places, plus a keyword field the user can use for custom keywords like Album 7 or Holiday trip to Italy. With &kphotoalbum; you can search for images in each of the categories - e.g. find all the images with Jesper on them from the holiday in Italy. It is of course possible to create your own categories, much more on that later.

- It must be easy to browse and View the images. When viewing images, your focus often changes - one moment you are looking at images from your holiday in 1992, and when seeing an image of a friend whom you spent that holiday with, you focus suddenly changes, so you want to see all images of that friend.

## Overview of the manual

In this manual I will take you through the steps of (1) annotating your images, (2) browsing and viewing images and (3) advanced topics and customization.

&kphotoalbum; started out as an application for managing your images, but since then it has been extended, so it today also takes care of your videos. In many places in this manual I will talk about images, but just as often the discussion does include videos.

## Organization of images and &kphotoalbum; files

&kphotoalbum; uses all the images of a directory and all subdirectories below it, first time you start &kphotoalbum;, you will be asked for the location of this directory. &kphotoalbum; will not modify any images, so you do not have to be afraid of &kphotoalbum; altering your images The two exceptions to this rule is (1) if you ask &kphotoalbum; to delete individual images, from Edit Delete Selected, and (2) plug-in operations., actually if you do not trust &kphotoalbum;, feel free to make all your images write protected.

&kphotoalbum; will save all its information in the file `index.xml` in your topmost image directory. This file is a simple XML file, so you can easily back it up using whatever tools you prefer, including normal backup utilities, copying the file to a floppy disk, or keeping revisions using VCS. There is also a backup script (kpa-backup.sh) provided in &kphotoalbum;'s sources that backs up not only the index.xml but also the configuration files inside user's home directory.

&kphotoalbum; will remember where you told it your images were located, and reuse that in future use of &kphotoalbum;. Should you ever want to load another database into &kphotoalbum; (i.e. another directory tree of images), then you may start it with the `-c` option. For example: ``kphotoalbum` `-c` `~/CompanyImages/index.xml``.