I currently organize my photos with the great KDE-based photo program Digikam (http://digikam.sourceforge.net/Digikam-SPIP/). What I would like to see in Coppermine is a way to automatically bring in the comments and metadata from Digikam and pre-populate the album data. It would probably work like this:
You would FTP a digikam folder to the server. Then, use the "Batch Upload" command to select the folder that was just uploaded. "Batch Upload" would do its thing, but also read the "digikam.xml" file in that directory, and use the information stored in it to pre-populate all information about the album. So the real trick is writing a digikam.xml->coppermine database import function.
I may be able to write this myself: where would I start in hacking Coppermine for this purpose? Is there a plugin functionality that is advanced enough to do this, or will I have to hack the "Batch Upload" code?
in the current devel code of coppermine there's a plugin api under development (although there's no documentation yet) - I recommend checking out the devel version using the cvs (http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=89658).
Joachim
The best approach will be to write a plugin for batch import - Even would like to see this functionality in a plugin