# Annotating your images

In fig-empty-browser-window you can see an example of the window that will greet you once you have started &kphotoalbum; with your own images.

At the top of the screen you will find a menu and toolbar, as you know from any &kde; application. Below the toolbar you see the browser window. In browser window you can select different categories to limit the images you will be inspecting. In chp-browsing we will get back to the browser, but for now, simply press the Show Thumbnails item, which will show you a thumbnail view of all your images.

## Starting &kphotoalbum; with your own images

The key feature of &kphotoalbum; is that you can annotate your images. This includes who is on a given image, where it is taken, &etc; You can do this either one image at a time, or you can annotate a number of images simultaneously (For example, all these images contain the person Jesper, and is taken in Copenhagen.)

To annotate images, select the images in question, and go to Edit Annotate Individual Items. Now you annotate your selected images one after the other. If you instead choose Annotate Multiple Items at a Time, you will annotate all the selected items as if it was one single item. In other words, with this option you mass-annotate your image - e.g. saying all these images were shot in Copenhagen. These two options are also available from a context menu, that you get by right clicking the mouse in the thumbnail overview or using keyboard shortcut. An example of this can be seen in fig-edit-properties-menu.

## Context menu for editing properties

In fig-image-config-window below you can see the window for annotating images and videos. In this window you can specify the date of the item, the label of the item

The label is initialized to the name of the file. The label is used in the browser, and when the images are exported to &HTML; pages

, a description for the item, and most important different categories for the item. In the screen shot, these categories are `People`, `Places`, and `Keywords`, but as you will see in sec-specifying-categories, these three predefined categories may be changed to your preferences.

## Annotating images and videos

All these annotations may be used for searching and browsing, as we will see in chp-browsing. On request you may see these annotations when viewing the items in the build-in viewer.

## Categories

In fig-image-config-window there are three list boxes combined with line edits for specifying people, places and keywords. These widget are a very important part of &kphotoalbum;, as you will use them over and over again, when specifying information about your images.

You can specify a property from a list box, simply by selecting it (Select say `Donna` to specify that Donna is on the given image. Alternatively you may type its name in the line edit. When you start typing a name in the line edit, &kphotoalbum; will look into the listbox, and search for the first item matching what you've typed so far, and fill it out. Thus typing `Do` might be enough to find `Donna`. Once you have found the item you search for, simply press enter to select this item in the listbox. The item will now be moved to the top of the view, so next time you need the given item it is even easier to find.

The idea behind moving items to the top when they have been selected is, that when going to, say a family party, you will get perhaps 50 images all with the same 5-10 people. When typing in information about these 50 images you will have the 5-10 people at the top of the listbox as soon as you have typed in their name the first time.

If you prefer to have the list alphabetically sorted instead, simply press the icon for sorting under the list box.

## Annotating one item at a time

When you specify properties for one image at a time, you may still of course select a number of images, and say, I want to annotate these images. In this situation, you will find a next and previous button under the image in the topmost rightmost corner.

## Annotating multiple items at a time

If you have several images with, say the same person, then it might be more convenient to select those images, and specify that this person is on all images using the Annotate Multiple Items at a Time.

If you want to annotate a stack of images you can do that when the stack is collapsed. You just need to select the top image of the stack and annotate multiple images. (If you annotate single image, only the selected image, the stack head in this case, is being annotated.) Of course expanding the stack and selecting all images works as well.

## Sub-categories

Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and California are all located in USA. Furthermore, San Francisco and Los Angeles are located in California.

Instead of specifying for each and every image from San Francisco, that it is in San Francisco, and in California, and in USA, you may instead tell &kphotoalbum; that San Francisco, and Los Angeles are in California, and that California among others are in USA. Doing so the browser (see chp-browsing) will offer you an item for USA, and an item for California in addition to all your normal items. Selecting California, you will see all images from San Francisco, Los Angeles, &etc;

In fig-usa-as-a-member you can see a browser window, containing USA as a super category. To indicate to you that this is a group, a special icon is used.

### Browser showing USA as a super category

In the context menu for the annotation dialog it is possible to add an item to an existing or new super or sub category. In addition you may simply drag an item to a category to make it a sub category of that item. Notice this requires that you are currently sorting your categories alphabetically. See fig-membergroup-config.

### Categories shown in alphabetical view of the annotation dialog

## Changing layout of the annotation dialog

It is possible to move the items of the annotation dialog around, simply from the bar at the top of the frames, and move them around - you can even make a frame into a top level window on its own.

Once you have found a layout that works well on your screen, your usage of &kphotoalbum;, &etc; simply press the Options... button, that will display a pop-up menu from which you can save the current window layout.

You may also choose to hide away a frame, or enable some that are not visible by default. You can always revert back to the original layout by going through Options... button, and selecting Reset layout from the popup menu. This can be seen in fig-redisplay-frames.

### Showing previously hidden windows.

## Annotating while viewing images

For a few decades we tagged our images as described above, but in the summer of 2023, it started being possible to tag images while viewing them. This facility doesn't support all the features described above, but it offers a much faster workflow to tagging images.

Missing features when annotating images from the viewer, which you need to come to this dialog for are:

- Annotating multiple images at a time

- Tagging individual parts of an image (this face is ...)

- Setting up tag groups (&ie; specifying that Las Vegas is in USA, so you will see images tagged Las Vegas when watching images from USA)

- Setting image dates

See the section on annotating from the viewer