Since everything is getting digitized these days, photographs as well. More and more people are designing their photo albums digitally. Right now every vendor has it’s own proprietary format. This is not just a lock-in but also a great risk that the photo album files can not be opened again. It would be great if the documentation foundation had a standard for photo albums as well. Has this ever been an item in the discussion about open formats?
A photo album destined for printing has a ‘de facto’ standard; nearly all printshops I know of accept PDF-files. PDF’s can also be used for slideshows/presentations.
Sure, PDF has it’s inconveniences; large file sizes, cumbersome editing, etc. LibreOffice offers the possibility of ‘hybrid’ PDF/ODT files which may be used while editing such files. For advanced PDF-creation for printing, some may prefer real DTP-software such as Scribus, which offers things like advanced colour-management, control of bleeds, and such stuff.
I’m not sure if it’s possible in LO (via macro?) to extract EXIF/XMP metadata information (e.g. comments, tags) from an image for use in image captions or accompanying text, at least that would be cool.
ajlittoz mentioned DigiKam, which is a fully fledged Photo-Management system, ideal for tagging, organizing, commenting, batch-handling photographs and has some advanced editing capabilities. As he said, DigiKam does not create any ‘virtual’ collections/rolls/albums to organize photos; you can use individual tags, a hierarcy of tags, flags, and colour codes to select/identify pictures. And those tags/marks can be written into header metadata of many file formats without altering the photographic data itself. DK supports also creation/reading of sidecar files for this information.
Once the photos have been tagged, the metadata can then be used for making various ‘virtual’ albums to one’s liking; for export to HTML or whatever, slideshows or to drop onto LibreOffice…
Hope this helps a bit.
It all depends on which fancy presentations you’d like. If you’re satisfied with rectangles parallel to the paper edges, you can do that with LO Draw or better with LO Writer since you can template your pages in the latter case.
I did so to make a photo catalog of my collections.
The issue is not only in the photo album format (e.g. iPhoto format is a convoluted XML file with a proprietary storage scheme) but also the storage and management engine where the lock-in risk is even more important. FOSS-wise, I’d recommend DigiKam (available on multiplatforms) because photos are stored in the filesystem, whatever it is and location of an image is predictable, and the DB is separate (with choice between SQLite and MariaDB=MySQL).
flip101 is probably not talking about how software is managing a photo album, but asking if there is a format that is/will be mutual for print services that offer printing on demand single issues of a personal photo book on paper. 