Re: Tag vs. Album (was Re: Album Support)

[Anders Conradi <beque telia com>]

Hi,

I only discovered F-Spot this weekend and really think it is a great
program. I have already imported and tagged my modest collection of
photos and it was very painless and fast. Because of work related issues
I can't contribute code right now but I hope that I can help in some
other way. Some functions are implemented in strange ways and others are
completely absent. I filed some bug reports this weekend with the ones I
found most obvious and I couldn't find any existing bugs for.

On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 18:38 +0200, Daniel K�rote:
> Am 29.08.2006 um 15:42 schrieb Warren Baird:
> 
> > John Stowers wrote:
> >> Please share your thoughts about Albums and Collections
> >
> > You described what you mean by 'Collection' pretty well in your email,
> > but I'm still a little confused about that you consider an 'Album'.
> >  From what you've described, an 'Album' sounds exactly like a 'Tag'  
> > does
> > to me - a named set of photos.   I haven't had a chance to look at  
> > your
> > patch, so maybe it's more clear there, but I think it might be useful
> > for you to define exactly what you consider an 'Album' to be.
> 
> Hi Warren and everyone else,
> 
> I do not completely share your view of tags. To me a tag is an  
> attribute assigned to one or more photos. F-Spot's capability to view  
> a set of photos with the same attribute does not really change this.
> On the other hand an Album (for me) is a collection of photos.  
> Personally I think of a book containing photos if I hear the word  
> (photo) album.
> So in my understanding there are two major differences between tags  
> and albums: (1) tags are assigned to photos whereas a photo is  
> assigned to an album and (2) photos in an album should have a  
> designated order whereas viewing a collection of photos with the same  
> tag does not need a designated order of the photos.
> 
> Let me elaborate a little bit more on these two issues:
> 
> (1)
> I think F-Spot does a *very* good job on tags. The difference to  
> albums is more or less a user interface problem: how does a user add  
> a photo to an album and is he allowed to add a photo to more than one  
> album at the same time. If a photo may be added to more than one  
> album at the same time then this should be visible somehow in the  
> user interface otherwise it may confuse users (happened to me with OS  
> X's address book and its groups...).
> 
> (2)
> What I expect from an album is the possibility to freely arrange  
> photos instead of sticking with a time-line view. Especially for  
> slideshows and any type of export ordering is a must (IMO).
> To stay with the photo album - book analogy, I would see an album as  
> a presentation of your photos, prepared to show them to your family  
> and friends (here comes the mission statement :-) ), synchronizing  
> them with some web service, and burning them on CD/DVD.
> 
> It's funny that no one came up with a feature request to freely sort  
> photos until now. Well, here it is :-) I can provide more ideas on  
> ordering/sorting if required...

Here I'm replying to this whole thread. Daniel actually raises the very
issues I find most important to capture the concept of an album.

There is a difference between tags and albums. I actually posted an
enhancement request the other day about adding groups to F-Spot (Bug
#353073). For some reason I never thought of the term album. I really
miss groups with custom ordering possibilities in F-Spot and hope it
will be added in the future. 

When it comes to terminology I find that an album should be preserved
for an ordered collection of photos. The functionality to switch between
different databases and repositories of photos I think are better
captured by the word Library. A real world library normally contains
books, but extending this to other kinds of collections like photos is
quite common. The other functions a library has is a repository of items
and one or more catalogs cataloging the items in the repository, but
also outside the library. I find that this maps nicely to the way F-Spot
is organized.

// Anders