Re: Sorting photos

["Richard Bronosky" <mythtv bronosky com>]

On 3/25/07, Fridtjof Busse <fbusse gmx de> wrote:
> And marking pictures with the mousepointer definitly should be easier
> (well, currently it simply doesn't work).

What doesn't work about Marking photos with the mouse?  I was very
pleasantly surprised by how well this worked.  F-spot actually allows
you to mark your photos by "shift-click selection appending".
Meaning: You have a few hundred photos you want to
tag/print/export/whatever so you click the first desired photo from
the top of your library.  You see that you want the next 50 photos
also.  You scroll to the last consecutive desired photo and hold shift
while clicking it.  All photos in between this last click and the
previous click are selected.  (This is standard computing paradigm
behavior.)  You scroll down several pages until you find the next
group of photos that are of interest.  Hold control while clicking it
and it is added to the selection, which you could verify by scrolling
back up the page if you really felt the need.  (This is also part of
the standard computing paradigm.)  Here is where it gets special, at
least to someone whose last windows computer was running win98.  You
scroll to the last consecutive photo of interest
and shift-click it.  All photos between this last click and the
previous click (the control-click) are added to the selection.  This
is special because what I remember of the old windows paradigm is that
every this between the click furthest in the opposite direction and
the current click is always selected.  It's hard to explain, but it's
even harder to use (the windows paradigm).

I'll try to further illustrate:
A. Click photo #320 on [f-spot selection would be: 320] [windows
selection would be: 320]
B. Shift-Click photo #350 [f-spot selection would be: 320-350]
[windows selection would be: 320-350]
C. Control-Click photo #405 [f-spot selection would be: 320-350, 405]
[windows selection would be: 320-350, 405]
D. Shift-Click photo #750 [f-spot selection would be:  320-350,
405-750] [windows selection would be: 320-750]
(At this point you scroll to the end and realize that you missed some
photos near the top.)
E. Control-Click photo #120 [f-spot selection would be: 120, 320-350,
405-750] [windows selection would be: 120-750]
F. Shift-Click photo #60 [f-spot selection would be: 60-120, 320-350,
405-750] [windows selection would be: 60-750]

I think you can clearly see the more powerful paradigm.  The same hold
true for tagging vs. folders.  Tagging is a more powerful paradigm.
You just have to get you brain comfortable with it and figure out to
UI (which I am not thrilled about but for 3 weeks now have be totally
unable to make a single change to).

I will offer this to you in regards to tagging.  It can be sped up by
highlighting to the tags you wish to apply on the left sidebar. Then
browse your photos selecting them with the paradigm above.  When you
get all of them selected hit Control-T to tag them.  That helps me
because I hate menus, and most of my work is done on the MythTV so I
don't appreciate mouse clicks either.

One thing that really annoys me is that in full screen mode hitting
control, to try and do a control-t to tag the current photo, brings
you out of full screen.  That really sucks!  But because Glade sucks
also... I can't fix it.

Anyway, I hope that helps.

Oh, if you want to tag every directory with its own tag, you may also
try modifying the DB directly, instead of using f-spot.  It depends on
what you are comfortable with.  I'm a command line user, so I always
gravitate there for doing anything powerful.
For instance, to rename a bunch of photos, I'd much rather not use a
GUI and just go:
for f in $(ls *.jpg); do mv ${f} ${f%%.jpg}.original.jpg; done;

--
.!# RichardBronosky #!.