On 06/30/2013 05:36 PM, David Vincent-Jones wrote:
Hi!
> The concept that dt has little or no database management
> capability is wrong wrong wrong!
I never said that.
The weakness is /not/ the concept. One could discuss the
weak coupling from xmp to raw, but once the stuff is in the
db I am perfectly fine with dt's concepts of displaying
information and searching the db.
The major weakness is the dublin core simple metadata scheme
applied in dt. This just that just misses crucial fields.
Expand that to a more decent scheme (IPTC is there for a
reason) most of the issues are gone.
Besides that, GUI for adding keywords is suboptimal. Here a
simple substring search instead of only searching the
beginning of a chain (a currently open bug, AFAIK) would
already help a lot.
One should think about displaying hierarchical structures as
a hiearachy. Why is this working for search but not for
adding keywords, e.g. Give my vocabulary a tree structure +
the ability to start typing a word to come up with all
matching terms and this gets quite fast in a slick GUI.
> I am a 'refugee' from Digikam and certainly in earlier
> days I had many misgivings over dt's way of approaching
> this area. it is different; that I will give you; it also
> requires adapting to some new thinking.
I admit, not to me. I just miss some fields and a bit of GUI
polishing.
> I now manage my files as a whole and not as individual folders.
Having them organised in (meaningless) folders is just very
handy for backups. My folders represent the size of one
external medium, nothing more.
> Collections spread over the system become more cohesive.
This is a nightmare for backups ;) So I have some struture
here.
> Layered tagging
> reduces the clutter of exhaustively long lists.
I always used what you call "layered tagging". Though I call
it hierarchical keywords, and I admit I do /not/ use tags
but only keywords from a normalized set (vocabulary), so I
call it "indexing".
Keeping such a vocabulary at bay is one of the other
functions missing in dt's metadata area. Sometimes you have
to add terms and later on you find that you didn't come up
with the proper relation so you need to change the ordering
in the hierarchy. Would be great if this could work by D&D
in the vocabulary tree and it get's assinged to the images
in question. (Well, I have a dream ;)
Anyway, concerning your example of what you call layered
tagging:
France|Paris|Churches|mice
is IMHO suboptimal, as it mixes various concepts in one
keyword chain. This is not good and thus should be
separated. The concepts in question here are a location, a
type of a building, and some mamal. One can argue about the
usage of pluar or singular, I tend to use the latter. To
"tag" (I don't like that word and it' very concept,
"indexing" is a far better concept) that, I'd use at least
Location|France|Paris
Building|Church
Mamals|Mouse
This would allow you to search for all mice in Paris but
also in New York e.g. You only need the mouse-chain for this
concept, while in your handling you'd have another one
USA|New York|mice.
To come to my mentioned weakness of dt here. In this example
I "like" (in my index it is more elaborated, but for the
example it's fine) the two chains
Building|Church
Mamals|Mouse
I absolutely dislike
Location|France|Paris
as there're decent, normalized, defined fields for exactly
these conceptis in IPTC Core
IPTC Location / Country
IPTC Location / City
To improve on your tags I'd further like to have
IPTC Location / Sublocation
to give the name of the Church in question (most likely it
doesn't fit into the title tag and even if it's not the
place where it should live as title is another concept).
Addtionally,
IPTC Location / CountryCode
can be very handy if you've a lot of traveling stuff. (3
keys normalized).
Of course I could model that as
IPCT|Location|City|Paris
IPCT|Location|Country|France
IPCT|Location|CountryCode|FRA
IPCT|Location|Sublocation|Note Dame
But this spoils interchangabilty, as not other tool will
know how to handle those chains, while almost any other tool
will know how to extract the city et al from the IPTC core.
So for sake of interoperability one should add the decent
vocabulary to dt.
--
Kind regards, / War is Peace.
| Freedom is Slavery.
Alexander Wagner | Ignorance is Strength.
|
| Theory : G. Orwell, "1984"
/ In practice: USA, since 2001
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