Re: Album Support

["Ben Monnahan" <monnahan gmail com>]

My thoughts

At first during the discussion I was thinking, "But Albums are just tags, do we really need to separate interface for them"  As Stephane says, I have them too, under Events.  Then I got to thinking.  Maybe albums aren't exactly like tags.  I have pictures of "Frank", "Eiffel Tower",  "Jesse's Bday 2006", and "Roadtrip to Tacoma".  To me "Frank" or "Eiffel Tower" are tags, whereas "Jesse's Bday 2006" and "Roadtrip to Tacoma" are Albums.  What's the difference. The album really *defines* the picture.  It's its most important tag.  Photos can only belong to one album whereas it can have many tags.  (this make break some others mental picture of albums)

Given its importance, I could see how it would be nice to create a separate way of selecting them.  That could be Johns way, or some other way, thats still to be decided.

Another idea I came up with on the train - pushing personal agenda here :)

This seems to help solve another problem I have with F-Spot, the organization of Photos.  What if, instead of putting the photos in year/month/day/ we put them in album/ or year-of-earliest-photo/album/ ?  I never copy to Photos because its nearly useless to have them sorted by date if you want to browse for them on the disk.  Apart from birthdays/anniversaries etc I never know the date a photo was taken.  I surely could find it in album/ though.

To make this work, In addition to  the "Add tag" we would add "Add to album" in  the import dialog.  There would be the option to leave it as (No album) or create a new one.  Under the covers it would basically be implemented by a tag + import dir.  Changing the album would move the photo to the proper directory.

Issues with this:
  * Photos can only belong to one album - For me this isn't a problem, but could be for others.
  * Subalbums, would we support them and how?
  * For (No album) would we revert to y/m/d/ ? - It could get full if someone never assigns to albums, also would maybe make the transition easier, since we all have a bunch of photos that aren't in albums.

And yes, we need to be careful about terminology, in a previous email to the list (Short Term Goals) I used the term Albums to refer to what we are now refering to as Collections or Libraries.

Internet access is fleeting for awhile here, so may not be able to respond quickly to questions.


Ben