Re: Sorting photos

["Richard Bronosky" <mythtv bronosky com>]

This is long overdue, so I'm going to go ahead and put this to rest.  I apologize for not explaining here why folders are not needed IN* f-spot, but I promise you they are not.  (I posted a comment to a WIRED article months ago that explained the difference between tags and folders and how a simple change of mind is needed to make the switch.  But, today I find that all the comments on that, if not all, WIRED article[s] are gone.  AH!)  I will write an explanation of this on my blog and send a link later.

* Folders are quite useful outside of f-spot and I think that is the whole reason for the debate.

Anyway, for those of us who are transitioning from folder based organization to f-spot (which includes myself), there needs to be a tool created.  A simple shell script could be written to:
1. Perform a "find /path/to/photos -type f"
2. Create a hierarchy of tags based on the folders that are discovered in step 1.
3. Access the db and tag each photo based on it's original path.
A complementary script could be used to export photos to a folder structure based on how they are tagged or create tar or iso backups.  If navigating photos from the filesystem is the need, we use an interesting solution with MythTV.  We have a "pretty view" which is just a complex system of symlinks to the actual videofiles.  The "pretty view" is just a FS representation of what MythTV keeps in MySQL.

Again, to really "put this to rest" I need to explain how tags eliminate the need for folders, and I will do that soon.  I just wanted to get the ball rolling on creating a solution to the need instead arguing about whether the need is valid or whatever.



-- 
.!# RichardBronosky #!.