Re: Album Support

["Dotan Cohen" <dotancohen gmail com>]

On 29/08/06, John Stowers <john stowers lists gmail com> wrote:
> Hey Guys,
>
> After the meeting today a few of us had a discussion on how albums
> might fit into the f-spot interface. This email is a summary of that
> discussion and also includes a an *alpha quality - aka ugly* patch
> that I hacked together to see how one incarnation of albums might work
> in the ui.
>
> We identified a few different use cases:
> Use Case 1:
> Freddy is a professional photographer with a few removable drives that
> he wishes to keep separate, (i.e. for different clients). He does not
> wish metadata or any changes applied to photos in one drive to in any
> way affect the others.
>
> Use Case 2:
> Sally is a windows user who is experienced at using picasa and wishes
> to group her photos into albums. She does not realise that the same
> thing can be accomplished using tags and yearns for the familiarity of
> album centric photo management tools
>
> Use Case 3:
> Tim is a great tagger of photos. He has over 100 tags and uses them to
> organise and describe his photos in many ways
>
> Potential solutions to these use cases were discussed.
>
> Potential Solution to Use Case 1:
> I was told that photoshop albums uses the term collections to describe
> Freddys situation. I will continue to use that term, each drive can be
> called a separate collection. To keep metadata completely separate a
> independent photos.db could be used. This could almost be solved using
> 344361 albeit with no GUI interface. Perhaps a ./f-spot
> --collection=photo.db for example.
>
> Adding this into the GUI without scaring or confusing users is a whole
> different set of challenges including loading and unloading the db
> while running, and making it clear what collection is being worked on.
>
> Potential Solution to Use Case 2 and 3:
> There is two parts to this problem. Make it easy to add photos to and
> album, and make it visually obvious that albums exist / can be
> accomplished in f-spot.
>
> Implementation wise, Albums are just Tags/Categories which exist in
> the Special Album category, i.e.
>
> |- Album
>    |- Trip to Wellington
>    |- Trip to Australia
>       |- Melbourne Museum
>       |- Sydney Harbour Bridge
>
> As can be seen in the screenshots I have added another tabbed page to
> where the tags are shown.  Personally, be separating the albums out
> from the tags like this it splits my hundreds of tags into two smaller
> more manageable subsets.
>
> I have prepared a very ugly patch which allows this to be implemented.
> The patch can be found at http://www.johnstowers.co.nz/files along
> with some screenshots. This applies cleanly against head (remember to
> add f-spot-album.png to the icons dir).
>
> This patch is meant to spur discussion about how to present albums to
> the user, and indeed if they are needed at all.
>
> Please share your thoughts about Albums and Collections
>
> John Stowers


Sorry for the late response to this email, but I've been away from
email access for a while and am only now catching up.

I think that the term "album" should be defined much as the term is
used for physical (paper) photo albums: a collection of photographs
kept together. Just like in real paper photo albums, a photo could
belong to only one album. Additionally, when viewing an album, photos
in any other album should NOT be seen.

The term "tag" should remain how it is.

Now, when viewing a specific album, only the tags present in the
photos of that album should be shown. There should be no evidence that
any other photos exist in the entire universe, other than a dropdown
box to select which album to display. Therefore, I think that each
album warrents its own photos.db file.

Also, albums should be able to be backed up and archived complete on
removable media. This would allow for albums to be shared amoung
F-spot users. My brother could photograph a wedding, tag all the
photos with the names of the people, and then save the whole album to
a CD-ROM and mail it to me. I'd open the album in F-spot and see only
the pictures and tags relevant.

See bug #352669 for more details to a solution.

Dotan Cohen