Running Linux, 5th Edition - Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [168]
Configure All Images Simultaneously allows you to set the location of all images from, say, Las Vegas with just a few mouse clicks, whereas Configure Images One at a Time allows you to go through all the images one by one, specifying, say, who is in them.
Figure 9-13 shows the dialog used for setting properties for the images. In this dialog you may either select items from the list boxes or start typing the name in question—KimDaBa will offer you alternatives as you type. (In the screenshot, I only typed J, and KimDaBa thus found the first occurrence that matched.)
The alternative way of specifying properties is to do it while you view your images (e.g., as a full-screen slide show). In this mode, you simply set a letter token on the image by pressing the letter in question. This usage is intended for fixing annotations later on—say you are looking at your images and realize that you forgot to mark that Jesper is in a given image. Once you have set a number of tokens, you can use these for browsing, just as you use persons, locations, and keywords. What you typically would do is simply to browse to the images with a given token, and then use the first method specified previously to set the person missing in the images.
Once you have annotated all your images, you can drive down memory lane in multiple ways. As an appetizer, here is a not-so-uncommon scenario derived from personal use of KimDaBa: you sit with your girlfriend on the living-room sofa, discussing how much fun you had in Mallorca during your vacation in 2000, and agree to grab your laptop to look at the images. You choose Holiday Mallorca 2000 from the keyword category, and start a slide show with all the images. As you go on, you see an image from when you arrived home. On that image is an old friend who you haven't talked to in a long time. In the full-screen viewer, you press the link with his name (all the information you typed in is available during viewing in an info box). Pressing his name makes KimDaBa show the browser, with him in scope. Using the date bar, you now limit the view to only show images of him from 1990 to 2000. This leads you to some images from a party that you attended many years ago, and again the focus changes, and you are looking at images from that party. Often, you end up getting to bed late those evenings when you fetch the laptop.
Figure 9-13. Configuring KimDaBa
Image manipulation with the GIMP
Introduction. The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is intended for tasks such as photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. It has been in active development for several years and is a very stable and powerful program.
The GIMP's home is http://www.gimp.org, the online manual is available from http://docs.gimp.org, and additional plug-ins to expand GIMP's features can be found at http://registry.gimp.org.
It is possible to use GIMP as a simple pixel-based drawing program, but its strength is really image manipulation. In this book we present a small selection of useful tools and techniques. A complete coverage of the GIMP would require a whole book, so read this only as a teaser and for inspiration to explore GIMP.
At the time of writing the current version of GIMP was 2.2. Minor details in the feature set and user interface will be different in other versions, but the overall idea of the application is the same.
Selection tools. When GIMP is started, it shows the toolbox window, as seen in Figure 9-14. The upper part of the toolbox contains a number of buttons, each of which represents a tool. There is also a menubar with menus for creating new images, loading, saving, editing preferences, and so on. Below the buttons is a section showing the current foreground and background colors, selected pen, and so on. The lower part of the window shows the options for the current tool.
To create a new image, choose File → New. This gives us a blank image to use for experimenting with the tools.
The first five tools are selection tools: rectangle, ellipse, freehand, magic wand, by