[Clipart] Crossplatform tools for Clipart?

[Alan Horkan]

On Sun, 17 Jul 2005, Spiro Angeli wrote:

> Also, one question: Now that I have openclipart installed, is there any
> application interface (like in Micro&oft that it has a clipart application
> where tou can browse all cliparts,......) that I will run and when I need a
> picture I would use it? In other words, hwo to use openclipart now, in
> relation to other applications?

I wish there were an answer for this but it seem for now there is none.

I am reminded agian of the need for crossplatform tools for
OpenClipart.org and I think that means we will have to all nicely ask
application developers to help us out and let us know if they have any
interest in reaching a wider audience.

I would love if there were an Open Source file manager we could recommend
to all our users.  The Thumbnail browsers I would normally use on Windows
do not support SVG and there is always the nagging feeling I should be
using an Open Source Thumbnail browser if only I knew of a good one
available for windows.

Gnome users have Gthumb but it is very much a Gnome application, I dont
think a Gtk only version even exists.

F-spot is also very popular and I believe it has very good
tagging/metadata support and presumably it has SVG support like most Gnome
applications thanks to librsvg.  I dont know if being built on Mono makes
it any more or less likely that F-spot would be ported to Windows.

Basically what I'm getting at is should we be encouraging these two or
some other project to become more portable and give us something we can
recommend to users when it comes to searching and sorting the clipart we
give them?  Frankly I'd love to see a cross platform Gtk based file
manager that could be integrated with and reused by Inkscape and the GIMP
and help bind them together into something resembling a Graphics Suite
(I'm not averse to cross platform KDE/Qt softare that supports SVG).

If we could even get people to agree this was a good idea how then could
we best go about encouraging developers to cater to this need?

Should we also try and encourage proprietary software like Google Picasa
to help us and support SVG?  I'd prefer to promote Open Source software
but promoting the SVG standard might be nearly as useful.

I'm thinking I should have maybe suggested this much earlier, like before
the Google summer of code project started.  That work will be useful no
matter what however I figure a much bigger tool will be needed to help
user manage to manage the massive quantity of clipart OpenClipar.org has
managed to amass.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape http://inkscape.org
Abiword http://www.abisource.com
Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/
Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/