Fwd: Album Support

["Ben Monnahan" <monnahan gmail com>]

This was meant for the list.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ben Monnahan <monnahan gmail com>
Date: 31-ago-2006 18:50
Subject: Re: Album Support
To: wjbaird alumni uwaterloo ca

2006/8/31, Warren Baird < photogeekmtl gmail com>:\

I think that the consensus is that either Library or Collection should
be used to refer to completely separate sets of photos with their own
f-spot.db, and that Album should refer to a sorted collection of photos.

I don't think that has been decided at all.  Yes the different DB/Photos we are calling Libraries or Collections.  Album is still up in the air in my mind.  I see two definitions not counting the first (maybe its so vague that it barely means anything)

1. Warren + (cant remember who): Ablum is a sorted collection of photos (tag + sort items)
2. Ben + John: Album is a collection of photos that comes from an inherent grouping.  This allows us to use it as the dir under Photos. (tag + import dir)
 
That being said, I don't necessarily see why we couldn't have both.  Why not allow ordering for any tag for example?  Whatever we call each one, if it is album it will require some kind of explanation, because as we've seen there have been at least 3 different uses of Album.

> At any rate, I don't know that I'd really use either feature, to be
> honest. Does anyone personally have a need for it? Maybe calling it a
> 'slide show' would be more clear to people?

I use the Library/Collection feature a lot - I implemented the initial
patch, because I needed this functionality.

This is a more advanced feature, but useful to lots of people.  Hopefully it will be visible for those who want it and nearly invisible for the rest.  Like Warren says we are renaming this feature.

If it was available, I'd love to be able to create a sorted album of
photos.   The one time I created a web gallery using f-spot, it really
annoyed me that I couldn't manually order the photos the way I wanted.
When I upload pics to flikr, I have to do them a few at a time to get
them on flikr in the order I want.

Is this and ordering you would want to keep around, or just for the upload?  I've never wanted anything but chronological ordering.

Responding to previous emails (I'm without internet so my responses are a bit delayed)

Warren: Birthdays isn't an album in my view.  Thats a tag, just like Frank or Boston.  It doesn't describe its essence just something about it.  Why couldn't Birthdays just be a tag?  Would your use case be satisfied if we allowed ordering of all tags? (ordering defaults to chronological as now)

Something to lighten the mood:
Anyone else think its funny that flickr refers to an ordered collection as a 'Set'? :)

John: the reason we need to make it one album/whateverwecallit per photo is because that is how it would be stored on disk.  We could maybe workaround this somehow with symmlinks or the like.

For those of you who like heirarchies:  Isn't the reason everyone is switching to tags to get away from them?  They don't always fit neatly into hierarchies because they would often go in 2 places.  Not to single out Sam, but his heirarchy for Photos looks like this:

~/Photos
 |-- 2005
 | |-- October
 |-- 2006
 | |-- August
 |-- Birthdays
 | |-- Sam's
 | | |-- 2004
 | | | |-- October
 | | |-- 2005
 | | | |-- October
 | |-- 2006
 | | |-- June
 | | |-- September
 |-- Brian's Stag night
 | |-- 2005

There are pictures from 2005 all over the place, yet there is a directory Photos/2005.  From my POV it would make the most sense to get rid of Birthdays (tag not album) then put "Sam's Bday" either at the top level or in 2004 (earliest photo is 2004).  I personally wouldn't lump all Sam's birthdays into one  album (I'd have separate albums for each and link with a tag if necessary)  because they are separate events, but I could see how some mike like it that way.  Especially if they wanted albums by theme.  Flowers, Rivers, Lakes (again I think these are tags, but this would left to the user)


All questions are serious (except the Set one) and not meant to be rhetorical.  I'm actually interested in the answers because I'd like to understand what people are looking for.


(back to the land of no internet)

My 2 cents
Ben