# Introduction

KimDaba stands for K Image Database.

If you are like me you have hundreds or even 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 persons 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 KimDaba is all about.

KimDaba focuses on three key points:

- It must be easy to describe 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. KimDaba offers two ways of description 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, persons on images, and date of image.

- It must be easy to search for images. KimDaba offers to describe images with a number of properties. These includes date, persons on image, location of image, plus a keyword field the user can use for custom keywords like Album 7 or Holiday trip to Italy. With KimDaBa 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 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) specifying information about your images, (2) browsing and viewing images and (3) advanced topics and customization.

## Organization of images and KimDaBa files

KimDaBa uses all the images of a directory and all subdirectories below it, first time you start KimDaBa, you will be ask for the location of this directory, as can been see in . KimDaBa will not modify any images, so you do not have to be afraid of KimDaBa altering your images The only destructive operation KimDaBa will perform towards your images is to delete individual images, if you ask it to from Edit|Delete Selected, actually if you do not trust KimDaBa, feel free to make all your images write protected - but as I said KimDaBa will not modify your images in any way, that is no rotation, no scaling, no changing colors,or anything are done to your images on disk, all these operations will be done in between reading the image from disk, and showing it on screen.

KimDaBa 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 what ever tools you prefer, including normal backup utilities, copying the file to a floppy disk, or keeping revisions using CVS.

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