Album Support



Hey Guys,

After the meeting today a few of us had a discussion on how albums
might fit into the f-spot interface. This email is a summary of that
discussion and also includes a an *alpha quality - aka ugly* patch
that I hacked together to see how one incarnation of albums might work
in the ui.

We identified a few different use cases:
Use Case 1:
Freddy is a professional photographer with a few removable drives that
he wishes to keep separate, (i.e. for different clients). He does not
wish metadata or any changes applied to photos in one drive to in any
way affect the others.

Use Case 2:
Sally is a windows user who is experienced at using picasa and wishes
to group her photos into albums. She does not realise that the same
thing can be accomplished using tags and yearns for the familiarity of
album centric photo management tools

Use Case 3:
Tim is a great tagger of photos. He has over 100 tags and uses them to
organise and describe his photos in many ways

Potential solutions to these use cases were discussed.

Potential Solution to Use Case 1:
I was told that photoshop albums uses the term collections to describe
Freddys situation. I will continue to use that term, each drive can be
called a separate collection. To keep metadata completely separate a
independent photos.db could be used. This could almost be solved using
344361 albeit with no GUI interface. Perhaps a ./f-spot
--collection=photo.db for example.

Adding this into the GUI without scaring or confusing users is a whole
different set of challenges including loading and unloading the db
while running, and making it clear what collection is being worked on.

Potential Solution to Use Case 2 and 3:
There is two parts to this problem. Make it easy to add photos to and
album, and make it visually obvious that albums exist / can be
accomplished in f-spot.

Implementation wise, Albums are just Tags/Categories which exist in
the Special Album category, i.e.

|- Album
  |- Trip to Wellington
  |- Trip to Australia
     |- Melbourne Museum
     |- Sydney Harbour Bridge

As can be seen in the screenshots I have added another tabbed page to
where the tags are shown.  Personally, be separating the albums out
from the tags like this it splits my hundreds of tags into two smaller
more manageable subsets.

I have prepared a very ugly patch which allows this to be implemented.
The patch can be found at http://www.johnstowers.co.nz/files along
with some screenshots. This applies cleanly against head (remember to
add f-spot-album.png to the icons dir).

This patch is meant to spur discussion about how to present albums to
the user, and indeed if they are needed at all.

Please share your thoughts about Albums and Collections

John Stowers



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