Re: tags vs albums

[Jakub Steiner <jimmac ximian com>]

On Thu, 2004-10-21 at 19:51 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> I think tags are orthogonal to albums as you propose them.
> 
> Tags are exactly what photographers wish for but cannot do with physical
> media.  A pro photographer stores a metric assload of photos, and when a
> client comes by and says, "I need a picture of a foo hugging a bar", the
> pro photographer has to go through his archives, looking for such a
> thing.  With tags, it would be easy to find.

Let me emphasize that I don't want to get rid of this functionality
(tags ~= keywords). I only proposed replacing the add/search tag
interface with albums and picture meta info editor. I was rather
unfortunate to write about tag concept while I really ment replacing
tags' space in the current interface with albums rather than removing
tags. 

I think the a very natural interface to query for stuff you describe
here already exists on the gnome desktop. I'd prefer using a quicksearch
entry similar to what rhythmbox uses to search for "foo bar" rather than
using the checkboxes next to the tags in the left side pane. I also
think Evolution's quicksearch filter could be simplified to match this
functionality (WIP - http://primates.ximian.com/~glesage/wiki/doku.php?
id=evolution:quicksearch).

> For non-pros, like myself, I like to use tags with a dual purpose:  to
> let me classify my images according to content, and to let me improve my
> photography.

I only propose to move the classification interface to the metadata editor.

<snip>

Thanks for your use case and the pointers. I will probably first come up
with a small paper-prototype user testing on the current tag vs
quicksearch interface. Only if this turns out in favour of the
quicksearch interface I'll give the metadata sidebar (for
classification) a shot and run another test.

cheers

-- 
Jakub Steiner <jimmac ximian com>