As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’ve been into photography since I was five years old.  That’s when I got my first Kodak Instamatic camera and started shooting photos and creating photo albums.  I have about ten photo albums, with most of them coming from when I got to high school and could really afford film and developing.  Ever since I got my first digital camera in my second semester of college, the number of photos I’ve taken yearly has increased nearly exponentially.  Because I’m an organized person, I started off putting my photos into event-based folders.  Once I realized that’d quickly get unwieldy, I decided to put them in folders by date.  Eventually, software like Picassa, Lightroom, and digiKam came out which would have allowed me to continue to to organized my photos by event because they could read the metadata and reorganize them by date.  However, I’ve found that my system has two main benefits 1)my photos remain organized even if my descendants don’t have access to programs that can read the metadata on the photos.  2) it’s very easy for me to very quickly find a photo.  It would be somewhere like 2010->Jan 10->So and So’s Wedding.

I figured it’d be neat to show you how my plasmoid works so you could use it when developing your own plasmoids.  Here’s the main.py of my data engine.  The indentation is off, in case you try to copy and past this in.

Here are the imports:

from PyQt4.QtCore import * from PyKDE4.kdecore import * from PyKDE4 import plasmascript #for flickr import views

Those are pretty standard.  The last one is the part of my engine that interacts with flickr.  Right now I have some work to do to get that presentable, but all you need to know is that it outputs XML to this main part of the data engine.

This was originally my #7 photo: now it is: which used to be #4

When I compiled the Top 200 feature, this was the #8 most viewed photo: and now it’s: which used to be #5

The #9 photo was:

and now it is: which used to be #7

Back when I compiled the Top 200 Photos feature, this was #10: and now it’s: which was not in the top 20 before, so it has really gained a lot of views.  That comes from the fact that it’s on Pixel-Peer as an example of that lens’ abilities.

The original #11 photo was:

now it’s, which has fallen from #8:

Originally, my #12 photo was: and now it’s: which was originally #9.  This photo, which was once my most viewed photo continues its slow descent.

When I compiled the photos for the Top 200 Photos feature, this was the #13 photo: and now the #13 photo is: which has fallen from #11.

I did it!  I have created my first ever useful GUI program.  After all these years of thinking that all the useful GUIs had already been invented - I found an itch to scratch.  And here’s how the final, working version looks:

[caption id=“attachment_5357” align=“aligncenter” width=“310” caption=“flickr views plasmoid completed!”] [/caption]

And so there it is!  I was actually surprised that this last little bit of the program wasn’t as hard to finish up as I thought it would be.  So, as currently implemented, when the plasmoid loads up it makes the data engine fill itself.  Once that’s complete you can click on the buttons along the top to load up all the photos from that group that are ready to be promoted to the next group.  Clicking on a particular photo loads up the small thumbnail.  View on flickr allows you to jump to the website in case you want or need to do that.  Originally I implemented it so that if the next part was hard, I’d at least have the functionality of the command line version of this software.  Then came the new part that happens to be easier in a GUI than on the commandline.  You can add the photo to the next group and remove it from the current one.  The reason I did it that way was so that if the photo couldn’t be added to the next group, it wouldn’t be removed from the current one.  I tested it first with a fake group and then the real thing and it works fine.  Before I post the code for my data engine and plasmoid, I have some cleaning up to do.  I also need to add in a bit more functionality for robustness.  After that, if I’m going to make it so that anyone can use it (and post it on kde-look.org), I will need to do some extra work.  So that’s version 0.1.  For version 0.2 here’s what I’d have on my TODO list: