Re: Category Name Refused



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.




[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]