Re: Tags versus categories

[Michaël Van Dorpe <michael vandorpe gmail com>]

On 11/10/05, Michaël Van Dorpe <michael vandorpe gmail com> wrote:
> On 11/9/05, James Carroll <jfc001 gmail com> wrote:
> >   What is the difference between a tag and a category?
>
> One of the differences I can think of, is that, if you double click a
> picture, you will see the picture with, at the bottom of the screen
> (next to the comment area), a bar with the icons of the tags that
> apply to that certain picture.
>
> E.g. for a picture of your dad and his dog, you would see the icon
> "dad", "dog" and maybe some others for the event, location, etc...
>
> If you remove the distinction between tags and categories, you might
> see the following tag icons: "people", "dad", "animals", "dog", etc...
>
> Of course, you could solve this problem by only showing the lowest
> tags in the tag hierarchy that apply. E.g. in the above example, that
> would be "dad" and "dog".
>
> In that case, if you have a picture with someone you don't know with
> his dog, the following tags would apply: "people", "dog", "animals".
> Here the displayed tags would be "people" and "dog".

An hour after midnight, after two hours of sleep, suddenly two
thoughts hit me about what I said above...

1. Some people might use the name of their dog. This would be the
lowest tag in the hierarchy, below 'animals' and 'dog'. Unless they
put their dog in the "people" category of course!

2. A more important point now... Remember my example above about the
consequences of removing the distinction category/tag. Using my idea
of only showing the lowest tag in the hierarchy in the tag bar, there
is a problem of consistency. Imagine you want to show all dogs in your
collection. You use the side bar, scroll down to the "dog" tag, and
select it. With the current state of f-spot (without Boolean search,
that is), this would only show everything that has the "dog" tag.
Imagine your dog Snoopy has its own tag, as a sub tag under "dog".
Showing all the dogs would of course also show Snoopy. However,
according to my idea of 'only showing the lowest tage', you would not
see the "dog" tag in Snoopy's tag bar. This is the consistency
problem: you just selected the "dog" tag, and there's a picture that
doesn't have the "dog" tag showing in the tag bar! This is not a big
problem with Snoopy, because you know why he shows up when you search
all the dogs. However, in some situations this might not be clear,
since you don't get a visual clue about why "snoopy" fits the "dog"
tag.

I'm a little confused myself now...