Re: Category Name Refused

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

Todd Slater wrote:
> > 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?
You're correct.  It would have been all right in my example if I hadn't 
been too general with my terms.  But hindsight is 20/20, so it's nice to 
have that loose coupling between the concepts (tags) and the words 
(label of the tag).

And sometimes you have less control over the changes to names anyway.  
For example suppose your friend gets married and changes her name?  Now 
your keywords are all filled with the old name.
> > 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>
Yeah, there are no predefined accepted meanings for a lot of these 
terms.  Kind of like how concepts are loosely coupled to words, huh? 
;-)  But the terms don't bother me.  I don't care whether they're called 
tags or not.  I just like them to be powerful for organizing without 
overpowering us as users.

> > 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.
As far as I know, there is no real distinction between category tags and 
other tags.  I think that any tag that is top-level would be a category, 
but practically speaking, I think there's no difference.  If you're 
interested in having all your tags be "flat", I would simply make them 
all top-level tags.  Don't bother putting them under other categories.  
I think f-spot gives you that option, doesn't it?