Organising photos

Mmmh I’m not sure we have the same idea in mind. Let me describe what would make sense to me (very basic proposal actually):

  • having a folder named Uploaded pictures where all the pictures associated to a post would be stored by default. It would basically be the same content as the “Photos” item which already exists on people’s profiles (keeping the link to the original post could be useful since sometimes the photo doesn’t mean anything without the initial comment)
  • being able to create other folders such as Holidays in Italy, where I would be able to upload some photos (or move them from another folder). For each picture, I would be able to add a caption and some tags if I want to. My friends would be able to drop a comment.
  • a system of hashtags that works as filters over all the folders. It would allow me to fetch all #beach pictures in the folders I have access to, and allow general referencing on Diaspora (in accordance with the privacy settings as well)
  • individual privacy settings for every picture that are in Uploaded pictures (inherited from original post), and then one setting per created folder

Main differences with conventional posts are : we can upload several pictures at once, storing them in folders which are easy to find and to browse. These folders could also be a simple tool to manage privacy settings, easy to understand, and easy to check in one glance.

Counterproposal: We can upload several pictures at once, tagging them with tags that are easy to find and use as filters. These tags could also be a simple tool to manage privacy settings (make all photos with tag T available to aspect A), easy to understand, and easy to check in one glance. :wink:
Tags could do anything folders can do, and if necessary, tags could be made to look like folders by making some tweaks at the UI-level. This would be a second step with much less priority.
Of course folders can form hierarchies, but you could have tags of the form #tag:subtag:subsubtag.

Basically, I think folders can be built/mimicked based on tags, so that organizing photos using tags is a very sensible first step.

you could have tags of the form #tag:subtag:subsubtag

Ok, good point, I haven’t thought about it.

But sorry, I still think playing with tags is much less intuitive for most people (we have to keep in mind that people like you and me, spending time on Loomio and gitHub or mastering Markdown are not representative of the average population), and I’m afraid it would rapidly getting messy. With tags you can easily create mutually exclusive conditions without notice, for example.

Then how would we deal with big picture collections: I click on the profile of some friend of mine that has hundreds of pictures referenced with hundred of tags. How would things be displayed: a list of hundreds of tags and one has to pick some randomly? Or a page with hundreds of photo thumbnails and filters at the top I have to try one after another?

And what if I upload dozens of holiday pictures and forget to give them a common tag?

I think that system is very convenient to retrieve your own photos, since you know which tag refers to what (that’s the way I use for the pictures I take). But when you jump into somebody else’s collection you need a clear view of the hierarchy since you don’t have a clear idea of what you are looking for or which pictures are present.

Globulle, all your arguments can be used to say, that albums are unusable by the users.

How would things be displayed: a list of hundreds of tags and one has to pick some randomly?

I now just replace one word with another: How would things be displayed: a list of hundreds of albums and one has to pick some randomly?

And what if I upload dozens of holiday pictures and forget to give them a common tag?

And what if I upload dozens of holiday pictures and forget to [add] them [to] a common album?

Tags have two main advantages over albums:

a) They are more flexible, because a photo can have more than one tag. If you prefer having exactly one tag per photo (like it would be with albums), then you can use tags just like this.

b) Photos can inherit the tags from the postings, they are uploaded with. So even a user who never ever visited the dedicated photos-section in diaspora, but only posted stuff, might have a well tagged bunch of photos.

And now what if a user uploads trillions of photos and adds thousand of tags? Well, the same user might get into trouble with albums as well.

Of course you can implement albums quite nicely so that they work fine for most users. But the same applies to tags. You can display tags exactly like you might have displayed albums to the user.

and I’m afraid it would rapidly getting messy.

I agree that tags like #thisisasentencewithoutspaces:subtag look messy. Perhaps, especially in the context of photos, it would be worthwile to find a way to make tags look more appealing. However, I think much of this can be done at the UI level. E.g. we could allow tags like #{this is a sentence with spaces}:subtag and then make them look like colored boxes or so; both while typing and while viewing.

With tags you can easily create mutually exclusive conditions without notice, for example.

Could you rephrase?

a list of hundreds of tags and one has to pick some randomly?

I’d say the viewer could choose to sort them alphabetically or by prevalence. Perhaps the profile owner could also create a list of “favourite filters” or something like that.

I think that system is very convenient (…)

This argument is entirely applicable to albums.

Photos can inherit the tags from the postings, they are uploaded with.

I think this is an excellent idea.

@globulle

So why don’t we poll again (not every month, but once a year on such an important topic seems reasonable to me)?

Because unneeded bureaucracy isn’t helping anyone. If a lot of the community has changed, fresh discussion presents a new idea, a developer wants to implement it in an alternative way, then it will probably happen anyway - no need to poll just because a certain amount of time has passed. :slight_smile:

Oh, and I’m sorry to interrupt, but I get the feeling that people aren’t really discussing proposals but rather letting out whatever ideas they might have in their head on the keyboard.

Maybe you could be productive and write down some concepts on how the different systems would work? We need well thought-out concepts if we’re going to discuss the which, how and why, and that includes tag-based systems.

@rasmusfuhse I don’t agree with your objections, especially on the first one, since the problem of having hundreds of albums would be much less frequent than just having hundreds of simple pictures

@demodradis : what I meant by mutually exclusive is for example : tag T1 is only visible by aspect A1, and T2 is only visible by aspect A2, thus applying both T1 and T2 would make pictures hidden from everybody. Such situations are not clearly noticeable, and may become annoying when using dozens of tag/aspect associations.

But never mind, thank you for your explanations that really helped me to conceptualize what the idea of tag would be. You almost convinced me! :slight_smile:
I sum up some points our discussion has highlighted (hope we agree on):

  • we should be able to upload several pictures all at once
  • photos would inheritate tags from the postings
  • the system has to be very intuitive, so the UI has to be designed carefully (and mimic albums to some extent?)
  • tags have to appear in a clear view (the colored boxes seem good to me)
  • we should propose solution to keep a hierarchy (such as #tag:subtag:subsubtag, e.g. #2014:Summer:HolidayInItaly)
  • having a way to suggest “favourite tags”, or “metatags”, to guide watchers

I would also make a suggestion : keeping in some way the chronological order of upload. That seem important to me, since most collections make more sense when viewed that way. Maybe some automatic tagging could be implemented at upload, such as #upload:timestamp. Also, I think some generic tags could be proposed by default, as it is often done in photo management softwares (#friends, #family, #nature, #party, #holiday…) to help new users.

I agree with @ivangabrielmoren we should write down some concepts on the wiki.

I have posted a concept of how organising images using tags might work in Diaspora, with some mock-up screen shots. Have a look and comment on the post in Diaspora. Once it has been refined through your comments, hopefully we can make a detailed proposal here in Loomio so the way forward will be clear for any developer who wants to build this feature.

https://pod.orkz.net/posts/b1bb32d0326101345bc000163e5dbca2

or append /posts/b1bb32d0326101345bc000163e5dbca2 to your pod’s domain to view it in your own pod, so you can comment.

Here’s the proposal in full so that people don’t have to visit a link to read it:


This proposal is for a user viewing their own uploaded photos; the filter feature could also be made available when viewing someone else’s photos, with some changes.

First, a word on nomenclature: I’ve used ‘photo’ and ‘album’ below, but it’s worth thinking about what terms we actually use. It might be more appropriate to use ‘image’ instead of ‘photo’, as not every image is a photo; and there might well be a better term we can use instead of ‘album’.

Please note that I’ve only shown three images in the mock-ups to save work, but the examples I give assume the user has uploaded a lot more!

To the current view of uploaded photos, I suggest adding the means to filter uploaded photos according to the tags added to those photos. This could be done by either:

  • Adding a ‘search’ bar to enable filtering of photos. When text is entered into this search bar, it will auto-complete according to the tags set for the images in the view.
  • Showing a list of all the tags added to photos in the view. Clicking on these tags then filters the view by those tags.

Here’s the first mock-up:
Proposed new photos stream

If wanted, these combinations of tag filters can then be saved to create ‘albums’.

Let’s say I want to group the photos from my holiday in France this year. So I set three filters: #holiday #france #2016. When one or more filters has been set, the view changes as follows (I’ve used a pop-up window here):

Proposed new photos album view

The tags I have already set appear at the top, and only the photos which have these three tags are shown in the filtered view. Let’s say 58 photos are included in this set. The other tags (not in the current filter set) which these photos have are shown below each photo.

Underneath, there is a list of all additional tags attached to the photos within the current filter, along with the number of filtered photos to which each tag is applied (e.g. ‘#friends (31)’). The user can click on one of these tags to add it to the filter. When this is done, that tag is added to the top and removed from the list at the bottom, and the photos displayed are filtered accordingly. E.g. if I click ‘#beach’, 19 photos will now be in the filtered stream, and the list of extra tags might read

#sea (8) #friends (7) #beer (3)

Let’s say that #mountains, #restaurant and others disappear from the list because no photo is tagged with both #beach and one of those.

If a user thinks a particular combination of filters makes a useful collection of photos, they can save this to create an ‘album’. I suggest that when the Save button is pressed, a pop-up opens which enables the user to give the ‘album’ a name. When a user has created one or more ‘albums’, the links ‘All photos’ and ‘My albums’ will appear above the main photo stream.

Proposed new photos stream

If I click ‘My albums’, a view containing each of the albums I have saved will be displayed, showing the album name and a cover image (the first image in the album, or we could enable the user to choose a particular image as the cover image).

If someone else is viewing my photos, this heading should read either ‘Albums’ or ‘goob’s albums’.


Related issues

Related issues which are out of the scope of this proposal, but which would be very useful, are:

  1. The ability to add tags to and remove tags from photos after uploading.
  2. The ability to add an already uploaded photo to a post after clicking the camera icon in the publisher.
  3. The option to wrap Markdown around an image when uploading it, perhaps with a pop-up to add alt-text or a caption; and the ability to select where this image will appear in the post by using the cursor in the publisher.
  4. Preventing a photo from being shared outside of the scope which it has been given (perhaps except by the person who uploaded it).

Another thing which might be worth considering is:

  1. The ability to publish images to specific aspects outside of a post.

There’s my idea. I hope it makes sense, and look forward to hearing what you all think of it.

goob

That sounds great @goob !

One part I did not understand:
"Additionally, a list is shown underneath of all other tags which photos in this set have, along with the number of photos which also have each tag (e.g. ‘#friends (31)’)"
What is meant by “all other tags which photos in this set have”?
Now that I thought about it I guess “set” is referring to the currently filtered collection of images.

To me then, however, one should also have the ability to add individual pictures to an album. The way described by goob is great when you want to create an album of your vacation in france. But what if you were to create an album of “Favorite moments in all my holidays”. That could be difficult to accomplish via tag filtering. Except if you were to add a #favorite tag to them all. That however feels like a workaround and therefore is not so user-friendly.

What if this “filter view” could serve as a means to add pictures to albums. You’d filter by tags “#bar #night #france #friends”, select the pictures in the “filter view” (e.g. by drag-selecting them) and drag’n’drop them into an album.
Sketch (sorry, only got paint on this PC…):

@timoses

One part I did not understand:
"Additionally, a list is shown underneath of all other tags which photos in this set have, along with the number of photos which also have each tag (e.g. ‘#friends (31)’)"
What is meant by “all other tags which photos in this set have”?
Now that I thought about it I guess “set” is referring to the currently filtered collection of images.

Yes, that’s exactly it. I mean additional tags assigned to the photos within the current filter. That’s a better way to phrase it - I have edited my proposal accordingly, and hope it’s clearer now.

To me then, however, one should also have the ability to add individual pictures to an album.

That’s a good idea. How about this:

Add an ‘Add photos’ button to the filter view. Any photos added by this route would automatically be assigned the tags in the current filter, which is a means of ‘adding the photos to the currently viewed album’.

There could also be a UI to ‘add photos to an album’ along the lines of your suggestion and sketch.

Add an ‘Add photos’ button to the filter view. Any photos added by this route would automatically be assigned the tags in the current filter

Hm? But in the filter view if you look at filtered images they will already have the tags that you are filtering for.
It sounds like your proposition is that albums should be mere collections of tags. Am I right? But as I mentioned above, it seems like an ugly workaround to create albums. To an ordinary user who doesn’t know the technical site it would probably seem odd to add extra tags to an image only to have it in an album.

Hm? But in the filter view if you look at filtered images they will already have the tags that you are filtering for.

Sorry if I haven’t been clear. The suggestion you quoted is to add the tags from the filtered view to any new images uploaded within that view.

It sounds like your proposition is that albums should be mere collections of tags. Am I right? But as I mentioned above, it seems like an ugly workaround to create albums. To an ordinary user who doesn’t know the technical site it would probably seem odd to add extra tags to an image only to have it in an album.

Please see the previous vote, in which the majority decision was to use tags to organise images in exactly this way.

Ah okay, I was not aware of that.

So in the end what specifies an album is that all images in the album have at least one same tag? At least that’s how I’d create an album:

  1. Think of an album name: E.g. Trip to Cannes
  2. Collect images that go there
  3. Tag all these images #TripToCannes
  4. Specify #TripToCannes to be an “album tag”

Other use case:

  1. I’d like all butterflies that I photographed in India in one album
  2. -> Specify an album that has only #butterfly #india

So, I guess the key here is to create a very user-friendly interface.

Necessary features:

  • Create album and specify album tag(s): Images with that tag will automatically be listed in that album
  • Select images that should go into an album
    • either add to existing album
      • select which album tag should be added to these images
      • or create a new album tag with which the selected images will be added to the album
    • or create a new album and specify which album tag should be used
      • either use one which all selected images have
      • or invent a new one which all selected images will receive as a new tag
  • Allow uploading images that can then be added to an album if one desires to do so

I think the filter view is superb and could be also used when uploading images. Additionally the album selector on the side would ease the selection/creation of albums.

Side note: Would also be cool if somebody posts pictures and adds tags to it that fit to an album that those images will be automatically added to the respective album(s).

My proposal is to implement all of the points you make.

Just to be absolutely clear: an ‘album’ is a tag filter. In my example, I created a filter with three tags, #holiday #france #2016, and named that filter set ‘France 2016’. (I suggested being able to name an ‘album’ when saving the current filter set.) In this example, all photos which have all three of those tags will appear in this ‘album’. This includes any photos which also have additional tags, e.g. #beach, #friends, etc. Any photos which have the three tags in this filter added to them in future will automatically be added to my album ‘France 2016’. There is no need to create an additional single tag such as #TripToCannes in your example. You example of #butterfly #india is exactly how I imagine this working.

Would also be cool if somebody posts pictures and adds tags to it that fit to an album that those images will be automatically added to the respective album(s).

Yes, this is exactly how I propose this to work. Although, just to be clear, it will only be the case that photos I upload and tag with #holiday #france #2016 would be added to my album ‘France 2016’, not when anyone else uploads photos with those tags. I’m not proposing this to be a ‘public’ collection of photos in the sense that photos uploaded and tagged by any user in Diaspora are added to it. It is a personal collection of my photos, although I might make those photos publicly visible.

I hope that makes my proposal clear now.

Absolutely agree with all points. Apart from the first use case I mentioned, that you don’t seem to quite get:
If I want an album where “random” pictures are in (not easily filtered/sorted by tags per se) then I’d need to add a tag to all those images to be able to put them into an album.

And album tags are exlusive, right? So an image has to meet all tags required by an album to be listed in it instead of just one.?

This proposal seems excellent. The following features would be also practical:

  • Renaming tags,
  • A way to structure tags, in case you have many. E.g. if you have a bunch of year tags (#1999, #2000, …, #2016) and a bunch of animal tags (#buffalo, #ostrich, #human) and so on, then you may want to group these somehow, perhaps in a folder hierarchy.
  • Maybe a way to have tags containing spaces and punctuation, although the world seems to have embraced the #clumsinessofspacelessandillegibletags.
  • Logical operators and, or, not for filtering.

Also, I’m not sure if being able to save filters is worthwhile, but I’m not opposed to it.

Tomises: adding tags to existing photos is already part of the proposal.

I like the idea of organizing through #tags!
I agree that D* should not be thought of as a storage cloud, more so for new users! that come in with facebook " “”“free”""" unlimited storage service" habits… I think it could be better if you could add caption tags to any photo and photos with the same tags get organized in ‘virtual’ folders that are basically tag holders.

And maybe some easy integration with mediagoblin services and other open source services could help discourage using D* as cloud storage and more as an integration-community-communication tool :smiley:

10 posts were merged into an existing topic: Display location of pictures based on EXIF data