GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 705708
Better way to add pictures to albums
Last modified: 2016-09-05 20:47:04 UTC
Hi everybody. I am trying the gnome-photo preview for 3.8. I really like the design, but I find it awkward to add pictures to albums, specially when many belong to the same album. For doing so, I need to click load more till all of them show on screen, then select them, then add to album. Otherwise, I can add the ones I see, the select others that are shown after adding the first batch, and repeat (I hope I was clear). Given that I organise pictures in folders based on albums, I would love to be able to use such structure to organise them automatically. If that is not a use case, I would still like a less cumbersome way to organise pictures in albums, so that I do not have to manually add all of them. I do not mind an hidden command line way to control adding albums and pictures to them, but I find the current way too time expensive to be followed. I do not really have a nice design solution to this problem, I just wanted to point out that picture organisation is rather time consuming as it is now, and I hope it can be improved. Cheers, Alessandro
Agreed. I also don't like the current "add to album" dialog.
Here are the latest designs: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Whiteboards/Collections
(In reply to comment #2) > Here are the latest designs: > https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Whiteboards/Collections That's about improving the existing album UI - I've filed bug 740435 for that. I think this bug is a bit different. (In reply to comment #0) ... > I really like the design, but I find it awkward to add pictures to albums, > specially when many belong to the same album. For doing so, I need to click > load more till all of them show on screen, then select them, then add to album. > Otherwise, I can add the ones I see, the select others that are shown after > adding the first batch, and repeat (I hope I was clear). I can understand this. The current grid view doesn't show many items at once, which makes selecting large numbers of pictures difficult. And yes, the "load more" behaviour doesn't really help. I suspect that, often, when you want to add large numbers of photos to an album, they are for specific days. For example: creating an album for a holiday, you essentially want to select a date range and add all photos from those dates. Perhaps one way to deal with the issue would be to have a timeline view that would allow you to batch select photos from particular days? > Given that I organise pictures in folders based on albums, I would love to be > able to use such structure to organise them automatically. ... This is certainly an issue for people who have previously organised their photos using the filesystem and, I suspect, prevents those people from using Photos. One possibility would be to provide an import or migration tool that would allow you to create albums based on their location. Another would be to always automatically turn folders into albums. The problem, of course, is that filesystem directories are nested and membership is exclusive. In contrast, Photo Albums are flat and photos can belong to multiple albums. It would be great to bridge the divide somehow, but I'm not sure how that can be done sanely.
I think it should be possible to use different methods of automatically creating albums from existing information such as: I. Tags. (seriously, tags are awesome and make it easy to use the same structure in different apps and services; if you already sorted your pictures in shotwell or anything similar, you don't want to repeat the process) II. Folders. (not exclusivelsy, but as an option) III. GPS-coordinates (grouped within a certain range of course) IV. Something like "events" wherein groups of pictures within certain short periods of time between them are sorted. These method could be organized 1) Always using those parameters as-they-are and automatically edit these albums according to property changes of the picture. 2) Through types of "import dialogues" that present you with those automatic albums and lets you choose what to use and just import them as normal albums, giving the possibility of changing the albums. 2+) After creating these albums, notifications about new pictures complying to the rules of automatic creation (e.g. same place, same tag or same folder...) could be shown, so you can choose to add them.
I second that. Also see bug #731904 and bug #725623.
In general it's better to have bug reports for specific changes that can be decided on and implemented. Here's some improvements that I think will help with the issues that were originally reported: * Show date headings, and allow selecting photos by date: bug 740415 * Improve the albums UI: bug 756133 * Automatically create albums for photos based on location and date: bug 764262 Please file separate bugs for any other specific ideas that could improve albums, like organising through tabs or creating albums based on directory structure.
*** Bug 770482 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***