Re: tags AND albums! (was: tags vs albums)

[Daniel Poersch <danielpoe gmx de>]

On Wed, 20 Oct 2004 16:32:21 +0200
Jakub Steiner <jimmac ximian com> wrote:

> *food for thought*

Sorry won't answer to specific statements from you but write down what I
think. Thus add some food ;-)

After this mailing and Garrett's call for input I thought a lot about
photo cataloging. Here comes what I thought:

As I already stated in the Subject line, my opinion is we should have
both, tags _and_ albums. I will explain for both why they have their
right to exist and what the usage should look like.

1. Albums
=========

Due to the following reasons, organising photos in albums is a good way:
o You normally want your photos from one trip/concert/walk/event grouped
  together.
o It is easy to understand for people because it is the way they did it 
  in the "real" world.
o If you allow (at least) two deeps of sorting, you can make
  top-categories, like 'Family', 'Holidays', 'Work', 'Nature', ...
Moreover it should be possible to select a preview thumb for each
album and (very important) add metadata to albums. It always annoyed me
that gthumb or gqview only allows me to put comments on images but not
on categories. But often I want to describe the situation in which I
made the last set of photos. E.g. describe the bands and the audience
mood at a concert, or the feeling I had during an autumn walk. This is
data which doesn't really belong to _one_ photo. More metadata which
would be interesting to record would be the date or timeperiod and the
tags which are set on photos inside the album (This would allow me to
rapidly examine which people where present at the event xy).

If I had all these possibilties, my photo collection would look like
this:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Energetic
`- 2003-07-11 Open Air
   Description: Really cool concert. We played together with three smart
                bands (Candellila, Crazy Train, Minerva). There where
                about 200 people and the mood was great (so was the
                wheater)
   Date: 2003-07-11
   Tags: Bands
         `- Candellila
         `- Crazy Train
         `- Minerva
         People
         `- Daniel
         `- Tini
         `- Flo
         Place
         `- Puchheim
         Event
         `- Concert
`- 2004-10-08 Housesesseion
   ...
Holidays
`- 2002-08 Bolivia
   ...
`- 2003-08 Black Forrest
   ...
`- 2004-08 Ireland
   ...
Nature
`- 2004-10-02 Autumn Walk
   ...
Family
`- 2003-07-16 Birthday
   ...
`- 2003-12-24 Christmas
   ...
   ...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------


2. Tags
=======

While albums offer a good solution for sorting your images in a temporal
and contextual manner, they doesn't care about single photos and
'type-changes' (eg often photos from the Holiday albums will fit well
into Nature or Family) inside an album. That's the point where tags get
their right to exist. It allows me to categorise the photos inside an
album. If I did my job good, I will be happy if I need photos from band
xy to create a new flyer or if I need my favorite photos from my
girlfriend from the last Ireland holiday to make a collage for
christmas.

But the current selection implementation should be changed, as I
mentioned in an other posting to connect each tag within a categorie
with OR and the tags from the different categories with AND.
And for the future we should think of a nice DnD interface for creating 
a query string. My current ideas:
o have a dropline where you can drag tags and AND/OR/NOT fields
  The problem is this is very technical.
  ------------------------------------------------------
  |        "DROPLINE"                 | AND | OR | NOT |
  ------------------------------------------------------
o Translate AND/OR/NOT in a more intuitive language and offer three
  dropboxes:
  -----------------------------------------------------------------
  | must contain (and) | may contain (or) | don't show this (not) |
  -----------------------------------------------------------------
  But especially 'may contain' is not really right (some will even say
  it is totally false).
o we need some ideas here!!!


3. Disclaimer
=============

I was talking about 'we' which is not really right. Due to a lack of
time and knowledge I won't be able to contribute code, but I hope I can
come up with some ideas from time to time ...

I hope this was a cunstructive mail and I'm really looking forward to
use f-spot (hopefully with albums and tags).

Thanks to the developers of this cool app,
Regards to the rest,

Daniel