Re: Category Name Refused

[Daniel Falk <f-spot mbx zapto org>]

Todd,
I really enjoy discussing this stuff.  You have a different perspective 
that I'm trying to be more aware of.
> >  A simple example.  Let's say you went to venice and decided to tag 
> > it The
> > Streets and Venice.  Then you wanted to change the tag to be "The 
> > Canals".
> > But you can't, because the tag doesn't correspond to a complete idea, 
> > but
> > only a set of words.
> Why not? Don't we use words to represent ideas? I could easily change
> the tag from "streets" to "canals". Maybe I just want to find all the
> canal pictures I have, I don't want to have to search for
> canals+venice, canals+eerie, canals+someotherplacethathascanals. Or
> even drill down some hierarchy like Places > Planets > Earth > Land >
> Continents > Europe > Countries > Italy > Cities > Venice > Canals.
While we use words to convey concepts, the concepts themselves are 
separate from the word we use.  "The Streets of Rome" can be a single 
concept, whereas the words are many.  And it often goes the other way 
too, where you have one word corresponding to several different 
concepts.  The bottom line: words are not the same thing as concepts.

When organizing photos, I'm interested in the concept more than the 
words.  Otherwise I could just type keywords for every picture.  Some 
photo organizers work that way.  I don't find that powerful enough.  So 
I'd rather have a tag that corresponds to the concept [streets of rome] 
if I so choose, that allows me to put whatever words I feel like on the tag.

Perhaps in the case of Rome and streets, that makes good sense to have a 
Streets tag and a Rome tag.  But consider this example.  I have pictures 
of my family and my wife's family.  I've taken pictures of my mom and my 
wife's.  So I have a "Mom" tag and a "My Family" tag and a "Wife's 
family" tag.  My mother-in-law is tagged with "Mom" and "Wife's 
family".  Now let's suppose I want to rename the "Mom" tag to "Wife's 
mom".  It will rename all the mothers in my entire photo collection to 
"Wife's Mom".  Clearly not what I want.  That was my point about the 
"Canals" example earlier as well.  It comes when you want to assign new 
words to your tag.

I hope that's clearer.  I'm poor at explaining this, as you might have 
noticed.
> >  It's not that I don't see the value of a list or cloud, but can't we 
> > allow
> > for both concepts in the same interface?
> I'm not a developer, just a user.
I am a developer, so maybe that's why I see things differently, but I'm 
also into photography on the side.  So far I have not contributed to 
F-Spot as far as development goes, but I am interested in doing so in 
the future.
> >  In my humble opinion, it's a deficiency to not allow tag names to 
> > have the
> > same name.  Unnecessary, and confusing to certain people.  Should this
> > discussion go to the bug report?  Does anybody have the link for that?
> It sounds like you want nested folders and I want tags. I think Picasa
> allows for both options in its interface, though the last time I
> looked the tags interface was rather clunky. I believe they called
> them keywords, but you can also use I think what they call albums.
Perhaps I want something closer to nested folders.  But those aren't 
powerful enough either.  Linux give you the ability to nest folders 
without using a photo manager like f-spot, so if that's all I wanted, 
the file system would suffice.

If you want a good example of what I like (as far as tags go), there is 
a program called Adobe Photoshop Album on windows.

I never liked picasa's system because I found the folders too weak and 
the labels too weak.  If they were put together into the same thing like 
Photoshop Album does, then it would have the best of both worlds.
> Can you just clarify why you need to use duplicate tags? I still don't
> understand. I mean as an end-user, I'm just interested in your process
> since obviously I'm not doing any coding.
It's not duplicate tags, but rather tags that happen to have the same 
name.  I just think they ought to be able to have the same name as long 
as the tags have different parent tags.  I mean, if my brother's name is 
Gary and I went to school in Gary, Indiana, I wouldn't want them both 
showing up all the time if I wanted to search for one or the other.  One 
solution is to name the tags "Gary, the brother" and "Gary, the place".  
Or you could do Places > Gary and People > Gary.

By the way, I really like your idea about related tags for when you 
select "giraffe" and it gives you a list of related tags you have.  I 
think your approach to organization makes perfect sense, especially for 
you, but I would like something capable of doing something more powerful 
as well.  I don't see why the system shouldn't be capable of doing 
both.  Therefore, if you don't like Category tags, don't make any, and 
it should work fine.