API or other interface between 3rd party programs

[kebel]

Hi!

I'm sorry if this subject has been discussed earlier (I didn't find any relevant threads but the wording might be different), but I'd love to have some kind of API to tag and retrieve tag files from my own programs. I think this would be really great, because more often than not, programs with useful features are very bad at co-operating with other programs. This is pretty annoying because I don't think any monolithic program does everything better than many smaller programs designed to do just one thing.

Anyway, it would be great to have, for example, a separate image viewer, that the users could use to tag the images without switching back and forth between other programs. Tag2find would simply provide a tagging backend and of course the search. A lot of programs offer tagging features but it would be really, really great if Tag2find would bind all the programs together. Why invent the wheel again and again and again (especially, if someone had already come up with a perfect design for a wheel)?

You mentioned in a thread you use SQLite heavily, I think this is one possible route to access the tags, if you could simply connect to the DB with your own program and do whatever you want. Although an proprietary API obiviously is the way to go.

Just some random thoughts as a fellow developer. Keep the project alive.

[martin]

Hi,

thanks for the suggestion. We are going to provide an official API to access our tag data at a later point in development. We have some very deep upcoming internal changes scheduled for the next few month, therefore we do not now want to publish one API.

But be assured, that we are already working on the API issue, as we are aware that accessing this data is important for other developers.

At the moment, I have to discourage accessing the backend database directly, as its schema is subject to change without prior notice, and, more importantly, the interaction between frontend and backend is not directly over this database, so any changes to the system database is only reflected in the frontend after a reboot and/or the restart of the service.

The best thing I could recommend is to wait for an official API, which is sure to come (but I can't promise you when exactly).

Thanks for your patience.

Best regards,
Martin

[Anonymous]

Great, exactly what I wanted to hear.

[Greg]

I play quite a bit with AutoIt3. Exposing the API is something I'll look forward too as well.