Re: Seeking UI ideas

["Curtis C. Hovey" <sinzui cox net>]

On Sun, 2003-11-02 at 10:51, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> So I'd need a way to store camera's photo in a way that make
> them easy to retrieve later either as single pictures, group, subject,
> people. I'd like to use storage for this, I guess it could be a good
> showcases and I have some motivations to work on it.
> Ideas on how it could work from an user interface pov, anyone ?

I'd start with data requirements first.

As these are camera pictures, I think EXIF field
SceneContent.UserComment should be honored to keep the data as rich as
possible, and within the expectations of image viewers and
manipulators.  Tools that use EXIF, but do not know the data/image is in
Storage, will see the relevant data in UserComments.  Likewise the
translator should read the UserComment for attributes.

FOAF (http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/) has some handling of images such as
depicts, thumbnail, name, and topic.  DC
(http://www.dublincore.org/documents/dces/) covers the title, subject,
description, author, date, and relation.  Together, both these specs
provide the info you need, and provide some compatibility for other
apps.

I'm not sure how to metadata into the UserComment, but I'm surprised to
see this link when I googled:
http://www.w3.org/2002/Talks/0920-yl-qh/slide15-0.html.  So someone has
already put some though to it.

I'm in favor of using topics/categories like PIMs, and Epiphany
bookmarks to categorize pictures.  While I name my albums, my photos
across my albums have a lot in common, so a combo menu of existing terms
would help me.  

Since pictures will tend to come from a Camera in bulk, I believe the
user must be allowed to select several images at once to edit their
collective properties.  Another mechanism would be to request
information before images are retrieved from a Camera or folder.

Would you be interested in smartening up gthumb?  When I get to my
Metadata phase for Medusa/Sutra/Storage, I wanted to make an app as you
are suggesting.  After more thought, I think a demo that updates a
popular app would be more valuable.  At least make your demo app ready
for disassembly for developers of photo tools to make it easy for them
to adapt to Storage.  

In my plans, I want to use the Medusa indexer to locate all the images
and audio files a user has to illustrate that a metadata database will
know more about the content than the managing application.  So the
manager should defer to the database (ultimately Storage).  Do you have
some plan that will illustrate the advantages of  PhotoStorage verses
other photo managers?  Natural search leaps to mind.  You might be
thinking of a browser similar to Rhythmbox?

-- 
__C U R T I S  C.  H O V E Y____________________
sinzui cox net
Guilty of stealing everything I am.