<chapter id="introduction">
  <title>Introduction</title>
  <para>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.</para>
  
  
  <para>&kphotoalbum; focuses on three key points: 
<itemizedlist>
      <listitem><para>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: <guilabel>one at a time</guilabel>, which is
useful for writing text about images, and <guilabel>All
Simultaneously</guilabel>, which is useful for selecting a 
number of images, and setting properties like location, people on images,
and date of image.</para></listitem>
      
      <listitem><para>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
<emphasis>Album 7</emphasis> or <emphasis>Holiday trip to
Italy</emphasis>. 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.</para></listitem> 
      
      <listitem><para>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.</para></listitem>
    </itemizedlist></para>
  
  <!-- ====================================================================== -->
  <sect1 id="sect-overview-of-manual">
    <title>Overview of the manual</title>
    <para>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.</para>

<para>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.</para>
  

  </sect1>
  
  
  <!-- ====================================================================== -->
  <sect1 id="sec-organization-of-images-and-KPhotoAlbum-files">
    <title>Organization of images and &kphotoalbum; files</title>
    <para>&kphotoalbum; uses all the images of a directory and all subdirectories
below it, first time you start &kphotoalbum;, you will be ask 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 <footnote><para>The two
exceptions to this rule is (1) if you ask &kphotoalbum; to delete individual
images, from <menuchoice><guimenu>Edit</guimenu><guimenuitem>Delete
Selected</guimenuitem></menuchoice>, and (2) plug-in operations.</para></footnote>, 
actually if you do not trust &kphotoalbum;, feel free to make all your images 
write protected.</para>
    
    <para>&kphotoalbum; will save all its information in the file
<filename>index.xml</filename> 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 CVS.</para>
    
    <para>&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  <option>-c</option> option. For
example: <userinput><command>kphotoalbum</command> <option>-c</option> 
<filename>~/CompanyImages/index.xml</filename></userinput>.</para>
  </sect1>
</chapter>

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