Re: tags vs albums

[Chris AtLee <chris atlee ca>]

On Wed, 2004-20-10 at 16:32 +0200, Jakub Steiner wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> *food for thought*

Mmmm...breakfast :)

*snip*

> Tags
> ====
> 
> As it stands, the user has a flat library of photos. Each photo can have
> a set of tags assigned to it, such as what place the image was taken,
> what event that was, who/what appears on the image. 
> 
> Query Logic
> -----------
> Tags enable the user to limit the view to images containing a specific
> tag. The user can also select multiple tags at once. Contrary to my
> point of view, this doesn't limit the query further, but enhances the
> view by adding images containing tags using the OR operand. How many
> times have you queried the library for "Photos from Boston or Tuomas"?
> "Images of Dogs or Favourite Images?".
> 
> With the current interface, it is not possible to query for Event AND
> Person so that one could get images of a person appearing while at an
> Event.

This never seemed like an intuitive way to use tags.  For me the
subjects of the picture, the location, description, etc. are meta-data
associated with the image (and should be searchable using AND/OR/NOT).
Having to create new tags for all the various people and places is a bit
cumbersome.

Tags are organizational tools, like putting your pictures into various
piles.  I have a pile for my favourite pictures, another for my
important pictures, another for ones I want to edit, etc.  They aid me
in my workflow, but they don't really describe the contents of the
image.

*snip*

> Proposal - Albums
> =================
> I propose we use a concept of Albums and Virtual Albums (similar to
> vFolders in Evolution) instead of tags.

*snip*

> Metadata
> --------
> Image attributes (including the stuff that's done with tags now) is
> defined at one place in the UI.
> 
> Export Implementation
> ---------------------
> Mostly every web image gallery is structured in albums. Even stored
> queries (Virtual Albums) could be generated as static HTML. 

I love it.  It's extremely flexible; I couldn't live without vFolders in
Evolution.  It should be possible to create a vAlbum for images that
need backing up, and then create an export plugin to actually write
these out to a .iso, directly to a cd burner, or copy to another
machine.

What are now called Tags can still be included so that you can mark
images as being one of your favourites, and then you can create a vAlbum
to look at only your favourite images.

> Further Mindbender:
> ===================
>       * Should we include Time in the queries? Or have time as a
>         separate concept to further limit whatever you have selected in
>         albums? That could give new options to the timeline scale - You
>         select an album and the the time scale changes accordingly
>         giving you options to further limit the selection by time.

The date and time that an image was taken should be another piece of
metadata, and should be available to search in the queries.  That way
you can create vAlbums for "Images I took in 2002", "Images taken in the
past 2 weeks", etc.  The time of an image should be editable since there
are many times when the time stored in the EXIF tags is not correct
(camera's clock wasn't set correctly), or not present (scanned images,
for example).  The timeline would scale according to the earliest and
latest pictures in the current query.

Just my 2¢

Cheers,
Chris