DVD-Slideshow, part II

Well this Sunday I spent a few hours trying to make a JPG slideshow with music which I can burn to CD or DVD. So far it hasn't been that great. I realized rather quickly that there are a few steps that I need:
  • I need to find the best images and collect them. The simplest is to copy the files to another location but leaving them in situ has a great deal of appeal.
  • I need to rotate some images, ideally it should be done lossily.
  • I need to crop some images. This could be done at the last stage on a copy so that the original is unnaffected.
  • I need to whitebalance, remove red-eye and otherwise fix some images. This requires a better tool and can't be done losslessly.
  • I want to add a comment to each image in the slideshow. Usually a funny comment but sometimes it's just, who is in the image and when it was taken.
  • I need to be able to get the image names (esp. if left in situ) and the comments via Python so I have the information I need to run dvd-slideshow.
I started using digiKam which is a nice program, but I was unable to delete images! It could be because I'm running in Gnome instead of KDE and the trash bin is a little different, not sure. Digikam stores it's information in sqlite in a few tables which works out for me. I'd prefer that it stored the comments in the actual JPG but I'm beginning to realize that no one does this. My guess is that there are no clear standards for storing comments (utf-8, iso-8895-1, and other issues). The other problem is that getting that information is slow. And if you keep the comments in a database you need to keep it syncronized.
My second attempt was with gThumb, at leas it let's me delete. But it turns out that it stores the comments in a subdirectory called .comments and each comment is compressed with gzip and stored in XML. Luckily I found a french site that had the 10 lines of code I needed to grab the comment.
After all that, dvd-slideshow didn't work, I needed to upgrade to the latest version and, after doing this, for some reason it's taking forever more work.

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