GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 361470
Support for SETS/ALBUMS
Last modified: 2018-07-12 00:09:27 UTC
Flickr has a great feature called Photo sets. Although I've never used Picasa, it seems it has an "album" feature. I've skimmed through all of the enhancement bugs on f-spot and to my amazement I couldn't find a feature request to implement this feature in f-spot, so here it is. Please implement such a feature - tags are fantastic for tying together photos, but they are not particularly appropriate for storing all photos from one particular holiday, or event. Tags should be snappy one word things which draw together loads of photos from different scenarios, and it is nice to be able to create sets of photos to link photos from a single scenario.
I agree with this. The current time-only based list is not very useful when one wants to view e.g. all images from a certain holiday trip. The fact that f-spot imports all images into directories separated by their date, makes this feature even more needed. All group information is lost after import, and there is no way to a) separate photos that are from the same date but are on two separate events or b) get all photos that are part of an event spanning two or more days except doing it manually through the f-spot GUI. If this album/set concept gets implemented, it would also be cool if I could specify this info during import.
I would also like to see some support for more traditional album concepts in f-spot.
Would it not be just as easy to select one of the following combinations perhaps Vacation + date range Vacation, France personally, I browse by date/time together with filtering on one or more of the tags. Whenever I tag a photo, I tag it with people's name, location (country, city, location), and event(s). Found that this made it very easy to find a particular photo among my 23,000+ photos.
(In reply to comment #0) > Please implement such a feature - tags are fantastic for tying together photos, > but they are not particularly appropriate for storing all photos from one > particular holiday, or event. Tags should be snappy one word things which draw > together loads of photos from different scenarios, and it is nice to be able to > create sets of photos to link photos from a single scenario. why you say tags are not appropriate for that? I do almost the same as Bengt. I've just started Picasa, but I couldn't find an album feature. and by the way, what functions should albums have, which cannot be done with tags? ciao p.s. an interesting/related bug: Bug #479103 – Default "ALBUMS" Tag
(In reply to comment #4) > (In reply to comment #0) > > > Please implement such a feature - tags are fantastic for tying together photos, > > but they are not particularly appropriate for storing all photos from one > > particular holiday, or event. Tags should be snappy one word things which draw > > together loads of photos from different scenarios, and it is nice to be able to > > create sets of photos to link photos from a single scenario. > > why you say tags are not appropriate for that? I do almost the same as Bengt. Tags and albums are two separate things. True, tags can be used to get an album like feature, but then you'll loose (or limit) the "tagginess" of tags. I think of tags as Mathew in comment #0, and albums are more a set of images that are grouped together because they are from a single event (i.e. "Holiday in Rome", "Mr & Mrs Foo's Wedding" etc.) One approach of visualizing this in the GUI would be to keep the current "flat" layout, but put some sort of boxes around the images that are part of an album (see attached mockup) Picasa has a very distinct grouping, see the screenshot on http://picasa.google.com/features/index.html Another way (the picasa way) is to separate the albums with headers and some meta information about the album. > I've just started Picasa, but I couldn't find an album feature. Picasa has two types of "albums": 1) Each folder is a distinct unit in picasa, visualized in both a list to the left and by headings/grouping to the right. If you have photos organized by folders, this is a good album implementation 2) They have a "album" feature, which I think is a virtual folder where you can add images. I guess it's visualized the same way as #1, but in a separate list, above the folders. See: http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=15253&topic=1142 In addition to this, they also have tags IIRC (not sure). I'm not sure which implementation would be best... > and by the way, what functions should albums have, which cannot be done with > tags? Nothing technically, except that they could be shown differently in the GUI. They could even be implemented as tags, but I think it is a usability gain if they are visualized differently.
Created attachment 98830 [details] One possible way to visualize the grouping of photos into albums. (I'm not saying this is the best way, or even the way I would like to see it though)
I think album support is a must-have if F-Spot wants to be more than just an image viewer. Imho the best way is to provide an album browser (like catalogues in gThumb), so you can switch between tag-based searching and album lists. Or you can display the album browser on the left and the tag browser on the right, like digiKam does.
*** Bug 353073 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Adding comment by Anders from Bug 353073: It would be nice to have support for groups of photos in f-spot. Then you could have one group for each slideshow, gallery, cd or portfolio. Perhaps those sorts of groups could even be their own subclasses of group with subclass specific functionality. The difference between a group and a tag is that a group is a collection of photos . The main ability gained by having groups is to be able to order the photos in the group as you like, for example to tell a story with a slideshow. You could also add the ability to place photos into a group at import. One thing to keep in mind is to make it clear that the group only contains references to photos and that deleting a photo from a group won't delete it from the catalog.
*** Bug 457444 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Maxxer asked "what functions should albums have, which cannot be done with tags?" Apart from presenting them differently in the UI, as Isak pointed out, I can think of a few things: 1. The ability to add a comment/description. If you have a whole set of photos that could be described once, it's very nice to have a place to put that description, instead of repeating it on every photo. I use this heavily in Flickr: I enter most of my text in the description for the set, and only add a description to the odd photo that's particularly notable for some reason. It really makes describing my photos less tedious. 2. The ability to impose an ordering. Chronological order is usually fine, but sometimes you'd like to be able to present your photos in some other order. In an album, you can usually move photos around, and the album will maintain the order. 3. Better match with the rest of the world. It's been mentioned already that Flickr has sets. Picasa Web Albums and Gallery have albums. It sure would be nice if you could just export your photos and your F-Spot albums mapped directly to online sets or albums. If you use the tagging approach to simulate albums, then you'll need to manually remove the tag and add the photos to the appropriate set or album each time. In the spirit of shoot first, ask questions later, I've fired off all my advocacy, and now I'll pause to ask: how are albums viewed by the developers of F-Spot? Are they actually considered unnecessary or desirable? Or is there actually ongoing work? The reason I ask: I was quite surprised to find this bug at all, since I first found this page: http://f-spot.org/Terminology It actually defines "Albums" as follows: "A group of photos that are kept together and arranged in a user-defined order, akin to a playlist in Amarok. A photo can belong to multiple albums. When an album is displayed, only the photos of that album are accessable. That means that the tags of photos not in the album are not displayed by default, and the timeline refers to the album being used only. Operations such as "Select All" or "Export", when done while viewing an album, will operate only on the photos of that album." Perfect! That's just what I'd expect them to be, but I thought I was just being dense when I couldn't find them in the UI. So, it certainly seems like somebody thought they should exist a year ago, when the page was last updated. Then, I found this: http://f-spot.org/Meeting/log_0603 "nzjrs-john bmon: I am working on a patch to make albums first class citizens also. Id like to have some discussion about it at the end" The topic pretty much got lost after that. I searched in the mailing list and have found a few threads on the topic, but I couldn't find any firm statements. Also, I found To Do and Goals pages, neither of which make any mention of albums. So, do people find this argument at all convincing? Are albums something worth working on?
(In reply to comment #11) > The reason I ask: I was quite surprised to find this bug at all, since I first > found this page: Bugzilla is used to keep track of requests (enhancements), not only of bugs. > So, do people find this argument at all convincing? Are albums something worth > working on? I think so (I asked that because I lack of fantasy :-P). The problem is the lack of time from the main developers lately... Just be patient, someone will pick up this request and propose a patch.
F-Spot has moved to https://github.com/f-spot/f-spot/issues If this Bugzilla ticket is still valid in a recent version of F-Spot, please feel free to post this topic as a ticket in the F-Spot project on GitHub. Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping as we are planning to shut down GNOME Bugzilla in favor of GNOME Gitlab.