Re: tags vs albums

[Garrett LeSage <garrett ximian com>]

On Wed, 2004-10-20 at 08:04 -0700, Alan Bailward wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-10-20 at 16:32 +0200, Jakub Steiner wrote:
> > Hi Folks,
> > 
> > *food for thought*
> [snip]
> > Proposal - Albums
> > =================
> > I propose we use a concept of Albums and Virtual Albums (similar to
> > vFolders in Evolution) instead of tags.
> [snip]
>
> Totally agree.  This is the way that iphoto has gone (though I don't
> think they call it virtual albums, but somthing else), and the concepts
> of virtual folders are common in other apps, from iphoto, itunes,
> outlook, etc.  The key is making the UI good enough so that it can do
> complex things without looking all that complex.

I think that's the way to go too... but it's just my opinion.  (:

We need to figure out the best way and go with that.  For my own personal use, I have been grouping by directory and I like to flag files to know which ones I want to do something with (like upload and what-not).  It might be useful to have a few different flags, kind of like email clients typically do.  

(Side note:  I also like having my mail sorted into different folder groupings too, so the photo grouping, I suppose, is also analogous to email in that respect too.)

For email, you typically have: normal, important, and spam.
There are also states: unread, read, and replied to.

To take this idea and apply it to photographs, it could possibly have something like:
  * Normal
  * Important
  * Trash This (well, some better word here, but that's the concept)

...and for states:
  * Normal
  * Edited
  * Published
  * Printed

I'm not certain at this point in time how user visible these should be seen (marking something ) -- possibly we could have the "vFolders" / "Smart Playlists" concept with some pre-established rules that match some of the above for useful things.

All of this would be in addition to the groups, of course.

We could also keep track of how "popular" a photograph may be somehow.  Things that it could be based off of is:
  * How long was it edited for
  * How many times it was printed / published / archived to CD / viewed in a slideshow, etc.
  * How many times it was viewed in a large state
  * How it ranks in context with other photos in a group (is it in a popular group?)
  * Does it have popular keywords?
  * How recent is the image?
  * Etc.

We could use the above to try to make search results more relevant, among other things.


> > Export Implementation
> > ---------------------
> > Mostly every web image gallery is structured in albums. Even stored
> > queries (Virtual Albums) could be generated as static HTML. 
[snip ]
> I'd say that including a gallery export and an export to flat HTML (with
> a few options of per page, fonts, etc) would be quite adequate for a
> start.  Having the flat HTML look nice, but also have a good CSS
> structure would allow the web designers out there to customize for
> themselves.

Yes, and we could have different "themes" for the galleries by having "theme packs" that are basically tarballs of CSS + images.  There could even be a nice selection of them included with the app, and maybe a repository of them located at the Web site too.

Garrett