Re: Sorting photos, please

[Sam Barker <sam quadrocket co uk>]

There seems to be a massive miss understanding going on between those
who want to organise by folder (for some very good reasons) and those of
us happy working with the f-spot style. 

For some reason there is a perception that to have photos tagged you
have to organise your folders the f-spot way. This is not true. You tell
f-spot not to copy your photos and it doesn't, you can still tag them.
The point made was that you can keep your folder structure by adding a
single tag for each of your old folders when you import and copy the
files. 

If your structure is:
	Folder A\
		img1.jpg
	Folder B\
		img2.jpg

The suggestion about import scripts and so forth was to add a tag to
img1.jpg saying "Imported from Folder A" and a similar tag to img2.jpg.
Once they are imported you can still see your photos as you oransied
them before, you can add all the extra tags you like. The only tag which
was being automated was which folder the file was imported from.

Sorry if this is old news to every one but it seemed like the point was
worth reiterating

On Tue, 2007-03-27 at 22:50 -0500, jason switzer wrote:
> On 3/27/07, George Talusan <george convolve ca> wrote:
>         F-Spot already handles the condition where your images are
>         organized by
>         folder.  Simply turn off the "copy image" checkbox when
>         importing.  The
>         only thing missing is reflecting this fact in the UI.  However
>         this is 
>         solved with importing one folder at a time and creating the
>         necessary
>         tag for it, and repeating for each folder.  No symlinks
>         needed.
> 
> That only works in the case that the tags you will apply to a folder
> are universal. This is not always the case with mine photos ( i.e.
> christmas photos with different people in them should get different
> tags).

There seems to be a massive miss understanding going on between those
who want to organise by folder (for some very good reasons) and those of
us happy working with the f-spot style. 

For some reason there is a perception that to have photos tagged you
have to organise your folders the f-spot way. This is not true. You tell
f-spot not to copy your photos and it doesn't, you can still tag them.
The point made was that you can keep your folder structure by adding a
single tag for each of your old folders when you import and copy the
files. 

If your structure is:
	Folder A\
		img1.jpg
	Folder B\
		img2.jpg

The suggestion about import scripts and so forth was to add a tag to
img1.jpg saying "Imported from Folder A" and a similar tag to img2.jpg.
Once they are imported you can still see your photos as you oransied
them before, you can add all the extra tags you like. The only tag which
was being automated was which folder the file was imported from.

Sorry if this is old news to every one but it seemed like the point was
worth reiterating

> 
> Now I was playing around with the Arrange By Folder (I somehow never
> noticed this before), but using a slider to navigate through even a
> half dozen folders was not intuitive in the slightest. I would like to
> see this improved. Using the slider to navigate folders would not be
> my first choice. 
> 
> So if I turn off the image copying during import, use the Arrange By
> Folder, and write all metadata to the file, I will at least be able to
> share tagged images without needing the photos.db. At this point, do I
> need the database for anything else? If I properly tag my images and
> they are left in place, is query performance the only other reason for
> needing the photos.db?
> 
> I think it would benefit F-Spot if this feature were improved to feel
> more like it file browser and less like some nebulous tag where all
> images are loaded and their thumbnails displayed at once.

I think this is exactly what F-Spot is trying not to do. A lot of the
current efforts in GNOME and other desktops is to move users (people
like my mum) away from having to think about files. She wants to think
about photos, and in that sense F-Spot is perfect. However you and I
understand how the computer works which means we try to be clever in the
way we use it to get more from it, however F-Spot is not targeting us. 

> 
> -Jason
> 
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Sam