Re: Category Name Refused

["Todd Slater" <dontodd gmail com>]

Hi Daniel,

On 7/11/07, Daniel Falk <f-spot mbx zapto org> wrote:
> Todd,
> I really enjoy discussing this stuff.  You have a different perspective
> that I'm trying to be more aware of.

Me too, I enjoy seeing how different people approach the same task,
and how an app can be flexible enough to meet their various
requirements.

<snip>

> 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.

Agreed, words are arbitrary symbols of concepts, but agreed upon by a community.

> 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.

I think that is what I'm after, then, because I'm interested in just
tags/keywords. For me these are concepts, too, but very broad. And
they can be combined.

> 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.

Well it would work if you had done it right in the first place <ducks>
;). I see what you're doing. I would have used either names or mom and
mom-in-law. What would you do if you had a picture of your mom with
someone from your wife's family but not your mother-in-law? You'd
still need to use "My Family" and "Wife's Family" and possibly "Mom"
and "Brother".  Would one family be dominant, such as if it were a get
together at your family's place vs. your wife's?

> I hope that's clearer.  I'm poor at explaining this, as you might have
> noticed.

Yes, that helps, thanks. As I wrote to Richard off-list, one of the
problems I think has to do with there not being standard, accepted
meanings for certain words we're using. What is a tag? A label? A
category? A folder? A category tag? Google Reader really confused me
when they offered both labels and folders and I could never figure out
what the difference between them was because they seemed to function
exactly the same.
<snip>

> 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.

I have seriously been considering this. I use Tracker desktop search
and previously played around with leaftag. If you took Tracker's
search results GUI and dropped that into Nautilus, you could tag
photos directly. Since Tracker knows when you move a file, that
eliminates the problem leaftag had with not being able to track moved
files. All that would need to be built would be a tag list and
possibly another search GUI and I think that would be a great little
system.
<snip>

> > 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.

Yep, I get it now. Again, I'd use different tags.

> 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.

So I have been using category tags I guess, when I put people under
the People category? If I don't use a parent tag, then is it not a
category tag? I think this is what is confusing me in F-spot lingo.

Best,

Todd