Re: Sorting photos

[David Stahl <othernerd gmail com>]

jason switzer wrote:
> worth of images, something like 3500 pictures. I have them structured in
> directories and organized by concept/event. Now I could go and tag the
> hundred or so folders individually, but to tag them all so that I have
> usable and search-able tags, I would have to do them individually. To

I assume you mean tag all the folders and not tag every picture (all
3500) individually.

I agree, that's a big pain. But so is upgrading to anything else -
replacing all of your VHS tapes with DVDs, converting all of your MP3s
to OGG, selling all of your Laser Discs :)

> structured manner that makes sense to the user. From what I am seeing on
> this thread, most people do not initially want this feature but only
> succumb to it, lock themselves into the tool, and then are forced to use

I apologize if my comments came across this way. My personal experience
came from starting with my own folder system. When I wanted to view some
pictures, I went to the folder in question, opened the first image and
then hit "next" or "previous" in Eye of Gnome. I took a chance and
imported all of my photos into F-Spot and I haven't gone to my
directories since. I love the timeline view and I love all of the export
 abilities.


> such as gThumb and jAlbum, give you the power to organize your images
> and not lock you into some special ~/Photos or photos.db type of setup.

The only thing I don't like about this is my fear of using up all the
space on my /home partition, but this hasn't happened yet and likely
won't for a while.

> It would behoove F-Spot it it freed itself from the concept of absolute
> control and organized the content in a manner that makes sense to the
> end user.

This is where we disagree. I don't see the "content" as my JPG files on
the disk. I see my content as my pictures and I see what I want to do as
viewing and sharing them. What I care about is viewing and sorting my
photos and sorting them by time matches my definition of "organiz[ing]
the content".

> Arguing that it just makes sense to you and anyone who disagrees should
> just commit entirely and get used to it is not a productive argument.

I agree it's not a productive argument. But I look at it this way:

The current behavior of F-Spot is what it is. I constantly see threads
about the way the data is organized but I haven't seen a concrete
example of why it's so bad to do what it does, other than "I have years
of data that I've put in folders" and "I want to keep pictures in my own
folders."

I see the lack of "Please add folder support that works like <this>
because I really want to do <that> and I can't do it this way and I
think F-Spot should support it." as a reason for the lack in productivity.

Would you be happy with an Import plugin or script that could take all
of your folders, import them into F-Spot and automatically tag them with
tags that match the name of the folder? Or give you some flexibility
with that? You mentioned in the beginning that touching every folder
individually was a lot of work. This could help you with that.

The point that started this whole thread was that "I like to sort by the
name of the folder and I don't want to do it all by hand" so why not
make a request for F-Spot to take a hierarchy of folders and create tag
based on the folder name and tag all the photos with it?

FolderA\
	FolderB\
		img1.jpg
	img2.jpg

Importing this would create two tags "FolderA" and "FolderB" and both of
which would apply to img1.jpg. img2.jpg would only have "FolderA" as a tag.

I'm not an F-Spot developer, I'm just a user and a casual observer on
this mailing list so take my comments for what they're worth.

-D

> There have been several discussions about this, so perhaps someone
> should pay attention.
> 
> -Jason
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> F-spot-list mailing list
> F-spot-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/f-spot-list