Re: tags vs albums

[Tim Gerla <tim gerla net>]

On Wed, 2004-10-20 at 16:32 +0200, Jakub Steiner wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> *food for thought*
> 
> I want to put the concept of tags, as we have them now in F-Spot, in
> question and propose a more natural interface concept. The suggestion
> comes from thinking about various tasks we came up for F-Spot [1],
> taking export functionality in particular consideration [2].
> 
<snip>

I agree with your comments that tags are kind of a difficult concept. At
first glance I like your albums+virtual albums idea a lot. The
separation of 'categories' and 'tags' in f-spot (and Adobe Album) always
confused me, and the 'mandatory' tags of 'people', 'places', 'events',
'other' always left a bad taste in my mouth. I think that the main
organizational structure should be Album, and a way to tag individual
items in an album with arbitrary attributes like 'printed', 'published',
'needs work', 'my favorite' makes the most sense to me.

Right now, I skip any local photo management tools except for Nautilus.
I download from my camera to a dated directory, pick specific pictures
out, upload those to my Gallery site, then caption.

I'd love to be able to import all my photos using f-spot, perhaps into
an Incoming album, delete the bad ones, create new albums within f-spot
as needed, caption, rotate, etc, and then publish my newly created
albums to Gallery.

I want to be able to keep my local albums and remote Gallery site as
in-sync as possible. At the moment, my local system happens to be the
"dump site" of photos, unorganized except by date. All of my
manipulation, even rotating and captioning, goes on the server-side,
which is slow, and hard to back up. I also find myself doing very little
post-processing, because I upload straight to Gallery. I think my photos
would be improved if I could find a better workflow.

I'd love to be able to do all of my manipulation Gallery-like on the
local side, and then publish to Gallery, but I haven't found a local
tool as good as Gallery yet. Hopefully f-spot will become that tool!

-Tim
tim gerla net
http://gerla.net/