# Thumbnail viewer

Selecting `View Images` in the browser, you get to a thumbnail overview of the images currently in scope (or all images if no scope have been selected To avoid that your X server runs out of memory KimDaBa limits the amount of images you look at a time. The limit can be configured in the `Options` dialog.). An example of this can be seen in below. The size and number of the thumbnails can be configure in from the Settings|Configure KimDaBa menu as described in .

## Thumnail View

In the thumbnail overview you can reorder your pictures by dragging them around with the mouse, or cut and paste them using the keyboard. But most important you can start the viewer simply by clicking on an image from there.

Dragging an image from the viewer to the background will set the image as the background image of your desktop.

By clicking on an image you load it into the viewer, if no viewer window is present, a viewer window will be created.

If you select a number of images, and presses `i` (or chooses "Images|View Selected"), the images will be loaded into the existing viewer (if no viewer exists, one will be created). Finally, pressing `control+i` (or choosing "Images|View Selected (in new window)" ), the images will be loaded into a new viewer.

## Deleting Images

From the thumbnail views it is also possible to delete images. To do so select the images you want to delete and press the delete key or select Edit|Delete Selected from the menu bar. Doing so KimDaBa will show you the dialog in

### Deleting Images

There are two ways of deleting an image in KimDaBa, namely either delete it from the disk, which means that it will be permanently gone, or tell KimDaBa not to include it. In the later situation, KimDaBa will never again show the image, but it will keep it on disk. This is useful if there for example is thumbnail images stored among your images. This thumbnail image would contain an overview of all the other images, and would thus be useless in KimDaBa, but for other application, say a web browser, it might be needed.

## Offline Mode

There is a constant battle going on between data growing, and hard disks getting bigger. If you have a large number of images, you might find yourself in the middle of that battle, not having enough hard disk space to store all your images. In that situation you might choose to put some of the images on cd's. An alternative scenario might be that you are going on a business trip, and want to bring your images with you, but do not have the 20Gb disk space requires for that purpose.

KimDaBa offers a solution to that problem, namely that it allows you to use it, without having the images available on disk. You do of course need to have them available at some point in time for KimDaBa to realize that there are new images for it to index. shows KimDaBa when it is not capable of finding all needed images on the disk.

### KimDaBa in Offline Mode

Images which has the corner cut of (that is image 1-9) are not available on disk. Thumb nails are, however, available for images 5-9, therefore KimDaBa can show you the thumbnails for these images. You can, however, still not display these images in the viewer.

As you can see, this feature requires you to copy files in and out of your directories, KimDaBa do currently not have any support for asking you to insert the cd you labeled blah blah. Thus please forget about this feature if you are the kind of person who do not like messing with files etc, and instead simply ensure to buy hard disks that is large enough to always store all your images.

For the rest of you, here comes the setup that I - the author of KimDaBa - uses myself, merely as inspiration.

I store all images in subdirectories called cd1, cd2, etc. (Where each toplevel directory correspond to a cd with the images, for backup purposes). When I go abroad and bring my laptop, I copy the images I want to the laptop, and for the remaining I create the directory structure which exists under each top level directory (e.g. cd1/holiday2003, cd1/birthday-party etc). In these directory structures I copy in all the `ThumbNails` directories, and for the actual images, I create symlinks to the cd drive. That way I can simply mount a given cd to view its images, and at any time I can see the thumbnails for any image.

The cd a given image is store on is specified as a keyword for the image, that way I can easily figure out which cd to mount.

Currently I have to restart KimDaBa to get it to recognize that the availability of images has changed. If you use this feature, please let me know at blackie@kde.org, and I'll consider polishing it a bit more.

## Privacy

Some time ago my girlfriend and I brought my laptop with us on a visit to my parents in law, to show them the images from our most recent holiday. KimDaBa turned out to be a great success, and it didn't last long before my girlfriends little sister seized the laptop and started browsing around on her own. Unfortunately it didn't take her long either to get to some, let say unfortunate, images of me from my youth, and they all had quite a bit of laugh on me. That episode inspired me to add a new feature to KimDaBa, namely privacy locking.

In the Images menu you will find a sub menu call privacy. To get some privacy browse - while you are on your own - to the images that you want to keep private, and select Mark Current View As Lock from the privacy sub menu. Alternatively you may browse to the images you want to limit your little sister to see, and select Mark Everything but the Current View as Lock.

Now you have specified what to hide away, and once you hand over your laptop to your little sister, simply choose Lock Images, and your sister will not be able to see the locked images. When done you may unlock them again using Unlock.

It is possible to specify a password that must be entered to unlock the database. In the privacy menu, simply select Change Password to set a password.

Don't get fooled to believe that this will help you hide away images for good. First the images are still on the disk, second, anyone with access to the `index.xml` file that KimDaBa uses can read the password in clear text and optionally delete it. This feature is only meant as a protection against someone sitting with KimDaBa unintentionally getting to your private images.