Re: Album Support

["Marcus Hast" <marcushast gmail com>]

> 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)
...
> 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
...
> 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.

I have a couple of points. Your first issue with the "general
organization of files" should be left to the user IMHO. Personally I
always organize my images by "import roll". (I do this by importing
images to one directory named after the day I do the import.) This
gives me a pretty general grouping of images both in time and
space/event. Personally I've found that this is really all I need to
find images quite quickly. (I typically have a general idea of when I
took a picture, and since I browse them all in one long "list"
(IconView) it's easy to find it. (For me at any rate.)

I have a few direct objections to your suggestion here.

1) An image can be in multiple albums. With printed images you can
print it multiple times. On a computer you shouldn't need to have
multiple copies of an image in order to have it in several places.
(IIRC even Gallery have fixed this now in their online gallery.)

2) The image shouldn't be moved to an album folder. Personally I think
it's "rude" of programs to move my files around. If the images are
moved so that the presentation in eg IconView should work better than
that means that IconView is broken, not that the images are in the
wrong directory. So IconView should be able to sort not only by date
and folder but also by import roll and album.

3) One of the complaints I've heard of eg iPhoto is that it treats
Albums like something completely different from other items. (IIRC
they have "labels" (tags), "rolls" (import rolls), "albums" (alums)
and something else. All of these have different UIs and it can really
confuse things for the user. Personally I rarely use the "label" (tag)
feature in Picasa because it disrupts my organization too much. It
just gets in the way.

Ideally it should be handled with something like a MVC (model view
controller) pattern. So basically you have a way to just look at a raw
dump of all the information (which is pretty much what IconView does
now) or you can select to look at it sorted and presented in slightly
different fasions.

Eg in the other thread I made a comment that it should be easy to
upload an Album to a website (Picasaweb or Flicker eg). However the
user shouldn't be required to make an album just to upload files.

/Marcus