On Wed, 2006-08-30 at 09:44 -0400, Warren Baird wrote: > Ben Monnahan wrote: > > My thoughts > > > > At first during the discussion I was thinking, "But Albums are just > > tags, do we really need to separate interface for them" As Stephane > > says, I have them too, under Events. Then I got to thinking. Maybe > > albums aren't exactly like tags. I have pictures of "Frank", "Eiffel > > Tower", "Jesse's Bday 2006", and "Roadtrip to Tacoma". To me "Frank" > > or "Eiffel Tower" are tags, whereas "Jesse's Bday 2006" and "Roadtrip to > > Tacoma" are Albums. What's the difference. The album really *defines* > > the picture. It's its most important tag. Photos can only belong to > > one album whereas it can have many tags. (this make break some others > > mental picture of albums) > > Limiting each photo to one album definitely breaks my view of them. > using your example, I might also want to have a "Birthdays" album that > contains the same photos as "Jesse's Bday 2006" and "Fred's Bday 2006" - > and a 'Jesse' album that contains the same photos as "Jesse's Bday > 2006", and "Jesse's Housewarming", etc...
> However, I think the key differentiator is what other people have > mentioned : Ordering. I think usable definitions are: > Tag: Identifies an unsorted collection of photos with a common theme > Album: Identifies a sorted collection of photos with a common theme > Surely the way you describe of using albums is exactly why we have tags, and what tags are very good at. A tag is just a tag! It doesn't have any other meaning. An album is a group of photos, this could either be a physical group i.e. in the same folder on a disk or a logical group that is a selection of photos with several tags in common i.e sam & emma & Edinburgh. > > Given its importance, I could see how it would be nice to create a > > separate way of selecting them. That could be Johns way, or some other > > way, thats still to be decided. > > Agreed. > > > > > Another idea I came up with on the train - pushing personal agenda here :) > > > > This seems to help solve another problem I have with F-Spot, the > > organization of Photos. What if, instead of putting the photos in > > year/month/day/ we put them in album/ or year-of-earliest-photo/album/ > > ? I never copy to Photos because its nearly useless to have them sorted > > by date if you want to browse for them on the disk. Apart from > > birthdays/anniversaries etc I never know the date a photo was taken. I > > surely could find it in album/ though. > > hmm. Now I see where your one album per photo idea comes from. > Unfortunately, I feel pretty strongly that we need the ability to put a > photo in multiple albums, but I think that breaks what you are talking > about. Unless we assume the presence of links and put the actual photo > in one dir, and then (symbolically or hard) link it into other album dirs. > > I definitely agree that an album based dir structure would be a lot > easier to navigate, if we can figure out a way to make it work. > > > > To make this work, In addition to the "Add tag" we would add "Add to > > album" in the import dialog. There would be the option to leave it as > > (No album) or create a new one. Under the covers it would basically be > > implemented by a tag + import dir. Changing the album would move the > > photo to the proper directory. > > > > Issues with this: > > * Photos can only belong to one album - For me this isn't a problem, > > but could be for others. > > I think this would be a big issue for me... iPhoto had the concept of > multiple albums per photo, and I used it quite a bit... > > > * Subalbums, would we support them and how? > > Hmm. Good question. In general I'm a big fan of heirarchical > organization. This is one of my complaints about iPhoto - it had a > flat structure of albums. As the photo collection grows, I think > *some* way to organize and group albums is important. > Support for sub albums is no more complex than albums, define a sub album as any non YYYY directory under an album. So the photos directory might look like: ~/Photos |-- 2005 | |-- October |-- 2006 | |-- August |-- Birthdays | |-- Sam's | | |-- 2004 | | | |-- October | | |-- 2005 | | | |-- October | |-- 2006 | | |-- June | | |-- September |-- Brian's Stag night | |-- 2005 This possibly has some dodgy assumptions but it allows users a clean way of importing photos e.g. just put them the current year/month directory. Then they can organise them properly later. > > > * For (No album) would we revert to y/m/d/ ? - It could get full if > > someone never assigns to albums, also would maybe make the transition > > easier, since we all have a bunch of photos that aren't in albums. > > Also a good question. I think what you describe makes sense. > > I might even be convinced that the y/m/d structure should be used > beneath all albums... for a birthday party album it might not matter > too much, but say you had an Album containing all your christmas photos, > or *all* birthday photos for a particular person. Having them > organized by year and date could be a good thing... > > Warren Though the more I think about this the less I see the need for a y/m/d structure of photos on disk, its a good way to view them within f-spot but is not very intuitive for use out side of f-spot. Sam *turtel* Barker _______________________________________________ F-spot-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/f-spot-list
