Hi, I only discovered F-Spot this weekend and really think it is a great program. I have already imported and tagged my modest collection of photos and it was very painless and fast. Because of work related issues I can't contribute code right now but I hope that I can help in some other way. Some functions are implemented in strange ways and others are completely absent. I filed some bug reports this weekend with the ones I found most obvious and I couldn't find any existing bugs for.
On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 18:38 +0200, Daniel Köb wrote: > Am 29.08.2006 um 15:42 schrieb Warren Baird: > > > John Stowers wrote: > >> Please share your thoughts about Albums and Collections > > > > You described what you mean by 'Collection' pretty well in your email, > > but I'm still a little confused about that you consider an 'Album'. > > From what you've described, an 'Album' sounds exactly like a 'Tag' > > does > > to me - a named set of photos. I haven't had a chance to look at > > your > > patch, so maybe it's more clear there, but I think it might be useful > > for you to define exactly what you consider an 'Album' to be. > > Hi Warren and everyone else, > > I do not completely share your view of tags. To me a tag is an > attribute assigned to one or more photos. F-Spot's capability to view > a set of photos with the same attribute does not really change this. > On the other hand an Album (for me) is a collection of photos. > Personally I think of a book containing photos if I hear the word > (photo) album. > So in my understanding there are two major differences between tags > and albums: (1) tags are assigned to photos whereas a photo is > assigned to an album and (2) photos in an album should have a > designated order whereas viewing a collection of photos with the same > tag does not need a designated order of the photos. > > Let me elaborate a little bit more on these two issues: > > (1) > I think F-Spot does a *very* good job on tags. The difference to > albums is more or less a user interface problem: how does a user add > a photo to an album and is he allowed to add a photo to more than one > album at the same time. If a photo may be added to more than one > album at the same time then this should be visible somehow in the > user interface otherwise it may confuse users (happened to me with OS > X's address book and its groups...). > > (2) > What I expect from an album is the possibility to freely arrange > photos instead of sticking with a time-line view. Especially for > slideshows and any type of export ordering is a must (IMO). > To stay with the photo album - book analogy, I would see an album as > a presentation of your photos, prepared to show them to your family > and friends (here comes the mission statement :-) ), synchronizing > them with some web service, and burning them on CD/DVD. > > It's funny that no one came up with a feature request to freely sort > photos until now. Well, here it is :-) I can provide more ideas on > ordering/sorting if required... Here I'm replying to this whole thread. Daniel actually raises the very issues I find most important to capture the concept of an album. There is a difference between tags and albums. I actually posted an enhancement request the other day about adding groups to F-Spot (Bug #353073). For some reason I never thought of the term album. I really miss groups with custom ordering possibilities in F-Spot and hope it will be added in the future. When it comes to terminology I find that an album should be preserved for an ordered collection of photos. The functionality to switch between different databases and repositories of photos I think are better captured by the word Library. A real world library normally contains books, but extending this to other kinds of collections like photos is quite common. The other functions a library has is a repository of items and one or more catalogs cataloging the items in the repository, but also outside the library. I find that this maps nicely to the way F-Spot is organized. // Anders _______________________________________________ F-spot-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/f-spot-list
