Re: Seeking UI ideas

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <marco gnome org>]

On Sun, 2003-11-02 at 13:13, Curtis C. Hovey wrote:
> 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.

Agreed. Though I suspect to make full use of storage capabilities it
could be useful to have more than UserComments ...

> 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.

Thanks for the links, I'll look at them.

> 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.  

/me just noticed that gthumb use epiphany like categories.

> 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.

Yeah, probably some sort of group concept would be necessary, which is
not the same of category. Often a group is just composed by all the
image that came from the camera at the same time, but not ever.

> 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.  

Yeah that's an interesting idea. I'd have all the show part already done
;)

> 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?

I must admit I have not thought to it much but here is a random list of
things that come to my mind (not ordered at all):

- Fast search in user comments
- Easy by date filtering
- Things like "photos about my girlfriend"
- nl allow to combine filter criteria easily (like "my girlfriend photos
in the year 20001")
- Easy addition to the database. In the base case you'd have just to
give a name to the buld of images you are adding and maybe select a
topic.
- Relations with other objects like email ...

In general I think the main advantage is the ability to associate the
images with multiple properties (topics, date, subjects ...) and to be
able to use these criteria in an easy way with nl.
One interesting problem in this particular case is the very low metadata
available automatically (compared to movies for example).

Thanks

Marco