Re: Album Support

[Stephane Delcroix <stephane delcroix org>]

Hi John,

All this makes sense to me. Having the album concept handled as a Tag
could be very useful for the Sally use case. Btw, most of us are already
doing this in one way or another... Personally, my 'album' concept is
hidden behind the 'Events' category.
Implementing it like you proposed add a way to have photos outside of
any album and having photos inside multiple albums at the same time
without duplicating them.

As you, I'm not at all in favor of showing Freddy's album concept in
front of Sally, but we can't ask Freddy to either a pro-photographer AND
a script kiddy. Freddy probably wants also all the beauty of nice Gnome
UI to select his albums. But we can keep that in the fridge for now. The
best solution for this could be implemented as a plugin (can be enabled
or disabled), and loads the plugins before the core, so the plugin can
display a dialog showing all Freddy's albums and a button to create a
new album. But as I already said, let's keep that in the fridge for now
(Maybe you'll have a plugin doing that with my next release of
plugins :) ).

One other thing about your screenshots, change the album entry in the
import dialog to a dropdown box (like for tags).

regards,

Stephane

On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 23:45 +1200, John Stowers wrote:
> 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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> 
-- 
Stephane Delcroix
stephane delcroix org