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:
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):
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.
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:
- The ability to add tags to and remove tags from photos after uploading.
- The ability to add an already uploaded photo to a post after clicking the camera icon in the publisher.
- 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.
- 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:
- 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