Re: Tag search for all / any tags

[Warren Baird <photogeekmtl gmail com>]

Anders Bo Rasmussen wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 11:51:55PM -0400, Warren Baird wrote:
> > It seems like a hybrid solution might be best -  default to AND between 
> > top level categories and OR within them, but provide a relatively easy 
> > way to switch that default on the fly (modifier key, RMB menu, something 
> > like that)
>
> To sometimes ANDing and sometimes ORing sounds like something that will
> confuse the average user.  But a simple way to shift between AND/OR and
> ID/NOT e.g. 2 buttons above the list of tags sounds like a good idea.

I originally thought the same (and said as much in a post recently). 
However, after thinking about it a bit more, it really seems to me that 
if the top-level categories are set up in a reasonably sane way, then 
sometimes doing AND and sometimes doing OR will 95% of the time be the 
'right' choice.  for example if you pick a 'Place' and a 'Person', the 
vast majority of the time, you will expect to see pictures of the person 
in that place (AND).   If you pick two places, you probably want to see 
pictures of placeA and pictures of placeB (OR).

There are places where it's a little less clear - if you pick two 
people, I think it could be expected to be either AND or OR...


> I would suggest to have a line like the tag line that appears when you
> press t. This line should appear whenever some tags are selected and
> write the current search term. e.g. "Paris or London" and then the user
> can edit this line (with the keyboard) to "Paris and London" or "not
> (Paris or London)" or "Paris or London or Madrid". Wasn't there a patch
> that did something like this?

There was a patch that was close - I don't think it supported not, and 
it didn't support grouping with "(" and ")".   and something like that 
is a good fallback...  But it'd be nice to have reasonably complete 
filters directly from the tag tree.

Warren