We probably won't ever expose folders directly because of our stated goal of being an alternative to the file manager for people who want to deal with a hierarchical file system.

But better grouping by dates and improving the search is something we want to do in the short term.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 740415 ***

If (In reply to comment #1)
> We probably won't ever expose folders directly because of our stated goal of
> being an alternative to the file manager for people who want to deal with a
> hierarchical file system.

> 
> *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 740415 ***

That's unfortunate! I think there is a reason why every photo management software I have come across so far has a folder view. Timeline view would be nice, but quite often the quickest and easiest way for me to locate an image is by folder.

I have huge difficulties finding any practical use in gnome-documents and gnome-music, but at least, documents and music have the advantage of containing searchable text and (usually) metadata. So here, you can still find what you want without folder view, by text search (at least sometimes, often it doesn't work as expected, and thus I have stopped using both applications).

But for images this minimalism just doesn't make sense. I don't tag every single photo I have shot. However, photos shot at a specific event or occasion typically end up in one folder. 

At the moment, gnome-photos is just completely unusable to me. I really cannot do anything at all with it. Nothing. Adding a time line will improve the situation, but still, locating a specific image will be a slow and clunky process unless a timeline view is complemented by a folder view.

Really, can you name /any/ popular photo management software that comes without it? I'd say, there is a reason.

On a side note, I am really concerned, that more and more GNOME applications are going in directions, where they just end up without any users at all. 

Who is still using Epiphany? Nobody. Who is using Evolution? GNOME-Music, GNOME-Documents, GNOME-Photos? I'd say that in what are the core activities of 90% of users: Web browsing, e-mail, document handling, audio and image handling, GNOME applications have become irrelevant. One could simply remove them and nobody would notice. And, heck, isn't that exactly what Canonical is doing? I find that sad, really! I'd love to use GNOME applications on my GNOME desktop, but the user experience has become so poor that whenever I give it a try, I give up after a few clicks. Sorry for the rant!

(In reply to comment #2)
> That's unfortunate! I think there is a reason why every photo management
> software I have come across so far has a folder view. Timeline view would be
> nice, but quite often the quickest and easiest way for me to locate an image is
> by folder.

Photos is not meant to be a typical photo management application. As I mentioned before, it is meant to be an alternative to Files for those users who do not want to interact directly with the filesystem. This is why we will never expose the hierarchical filesystem in the application.

> So here, you can still find what you
> want without folder view, by text search (at least sometimes, often it doesn't
> work as expected, and thus I have stopped using both applications).

I would love to receive bug reports (against gnome-documents) about the cases where search did not work for you in gnome-documents.
 
> But for images this minimalism just doesn't make sense. I don't tag every
> single photo I have shot. However, photos shot at a specific event or occasion
> typically end up in one folder. 

Automatically creating albums is one possibility.