Re: Patch Review please : 321770 - Import Roll History

["Marcus Hast" <marcushast gmail com>]

Hi,
I understand your point, but I really don't agree with it. ;-)

> The 'roll', as in import roll or film roll, is not an natural unit. the
> size of the roll is limited by an external factor (size of your mem card
> or length of your film) not related at all to the content, the event
> unit, or the time unit of the images stored on the roll.

Yes and no. Personally I almost always empty my memory cards before
they fill up (particularly since I got a 4GB card for my 20D). So in
my case a "roll" is actually pretty much always a natural way to group
images as they represent a very high locality in time and event.

This wouldn't be a very big issue for me if there were other ways of
grouping photos in F-Spot but this is one of the bigges missing
features for me right now. (All very much in my opinion of course. And
since it's OSS I can help fix it.)

My point is basically that there needs to be a way to differentiate
between photos of my birthday this year and last year. I can do this
today but it requires quite a bit more work than I think is
appropriate. My gripe here is that I currently have about 8000
pictures and I often take groups of 50+ images per "roll". When I get
all of these images in one long list at the same time it's not really
helpful. I can of course search for images but again I then get into
problems where images are not grouped in any simple way.

Really what I want is a way to group images and then give that group a
tag. This is not the same thing as giving all the images in the group
the same tag (but it may at first seem like it). Consider if I take a
series of images to make a panorama. Now I can tag those images with
"panorama" but then if I select to view all my photos with that tag I
get all panoramas I have taken. And if I have taken multiple panoramas
in the same city it can be annoying to find those which belong to the
same series.

So basically I want a way to tell the program that "These photos
belong together, treat them as a group." Import rolls are one way of
doing this (in a large scale). But it's really only a special case of
grouping.

> ... As a film photographer you're
> probably used to work with rolls as unit, but I think that's not a good
> habit in the digital world.

I'm not so sure. ;-)

Perhaps it's just the way I tend to shoot pictures but I often find
that I like to browse photos by the session they were shot. Usually it
means that they have a high locality in content and time.

> I will not discuss the 'keep the import time' stuff, becaus I don't have
> any opinion on it and it's part of another bug entry
>
> As usual, all of this is open to discussion

My main point with this fix is that it seems to me that adding the
"import time" to each photo and then using that to sort would be a
simpler and more elegant solution than adding a new table to the
database.

But again, I may well be missing some obvious flaws with performance
or similar with that idea.

/Marcus