Re: Album Support

["John Stowers" <john stowers lists gmail com>]

I think you may have misunderstood (or i didnt explain properly)

If an album is supplied during import AND the user selects to "Move
photos to photo directory" AND we allow photos to be organised by
album on disk then the photos will be copied to the photos directory
in a new folder named after the supplied album. In addition these
photos will be "tagged" with the new album tag.

Compare this with the current behavior where if the user selects "copy
photos" then photos are copied and arraged by date.

> 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.)

I am proposing that albums are just like tags, i.e. a photo can belong
to many albums just like it may have many tags.

> 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.

See top. The album setting will not override the "Move photos to photo
directory" setting.

> 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.

Yes I am trying to avoid the iphoto way where the sidbar becomes
crowded and filled with similar looking things which all act
differently.

> 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.

Correct. Perhaps metadata may be attached to albums, or this may be
implemented with some kind of photo tray like picasa.

John