Re: Sorting photos

["jason switzer" <jswitzer gmail com>]

On 3/26/07, David Stahl <othernerd gmail com> wrote:

I assume you mean tag all the folders and not tag every picture (all
3500) individually.

I agree, that's a big pain. But so is upgrading to anything else -
replacing all of your VHS tapes with DVDs, converting all of your MP3s
to OGG, selling all of your Laser Discs :)

The difference is it is very difficult to automate the process of identifying the tags. For example, tagging all photos that remind you of something cannot be easily automated, whereas converting all of your MP3s into Oggs can be accomplished autonomously with a simple shell script.

I apologize if my comments came across this way. My personal experience
came from starting with my own folder system. When I wanted to view some
pictures, I went to the folder in question, opened the first image and
then hit "next" or "previous" in Eye of Gnome. I took a chance and
imported all of my photos into F-Spot and I haven't gone to my
directories since. I love the timeline view and I love all of the export
abilities.

Even with my folder structure, I don't even bother using the whole Next/Previous. That's what thumbnail overviews are for. I hardly if EVER remember the dates (maybe year) that my pictures are taken. I remember them by the event or the concept.

The only thing I don't like about this is my fear of using up all the
space on my /home partition, but this hasn't happened yet and likely
won't for a while.

I don't really want to waste any unnecessary space on my file server and I'm sure there are other people who find it equally annoying to have to copy several  thousand pictures into the ~/Photos folder.

This is where we disagree. I don't see the "content" as my JPG files on
the disk. I see my content as my pictures and I see what I want to do as
viewing and sharing them. What I care about is viewing and sorting my
photos and sorting them by time matches my definition of "organiz[ing]
the content".

I happen to think that I have my images well organized already. I would apply tags only so that I can search faster for images that contain certain things, happen at certain events, or remind me of certain concepts. As I said before, I hardly if ever remember the time that I took a picture but the concept or what the picture contains. That is how I would prefer organizing them.

I agree it's not a productive argument. But I look at it this way:

The current behavior of F-Spot is what it is. I constantly see threads
about the way the data is organized but I haven't seen a concrete
example of why it's so bad to do what it does, other than "I have years
of data that I've put in folders" and "I want to keep pictures in my own
folders."

I see the lack of "Please add folder support that works like <this>
because I really want to do <that> and I can't do it this way and I
think F-Spot should support it." as a reason for the lack in productivity.

Would you be happy with an Import plugin or script that could take all
of your folders, import them into F-Spot and automatically tag them with
tags that match the name of the folder? Or give you some flexibility
with that? You mentioned in the beginning that touching every folder
individually was a lot of work. This could help you with that.

Anything that offers more flexibility to work with the way I already have all of my images organized would be an improvement. I wouldn't actually tag them with the folder name in all cases, but at least that would be a step in the right direction. Like I said before, applying tags to many pictures is extremely time consuming and a way to deal with just a certain folder at a time would make things easier.

The point that started this whole thread was that "I like to sort by the
name of the folder and I don't want to do it all by hand" so why not
make a request for F-Spot to take a hierarchy of folders and create tag
based on the folder name and tag all the photos with it?

FolderA\
        FolderB\
                img1.jpg
        img2.jpg

Importing this would create two tags "FolderA" and "FolderB" and both of
which would apply to img1.jpg. img2.jpg would only have "FolderA" as a tag.

This is wrong because there is no logical organization for multiple tags. If image1 has tags A and B, it would be laid out in A/B/image1. If image2 has tags B, it would be laid out in B/image2. This would be a rather cumbersome process to find all images on my hard-drive with the B tag.

-Jason