It would be good to discuss ideas for how to organise photos in Diaspora. I’ve seen two ideas proposed so far: Facebook-style ‘albums’ and using tags to organise photos.
It would be interesting to hear people’s views on the merits and drawbacks of these and any other ideas you have for organising photos.
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I don’t think of Diaspora as a photo-organizing website. Putting photos into posts is important, but for organized photos there are things like flickr, owncloud, mediagoblin or other services, that are dedicated to managing albums.
Also I don’t think we should encourage users to put their large blob content on diaspora-servers - so that podmins won’t have to fear the big space usage this would bringt with it. Diaspora should not be a filehoster. 
Just my 2 cents.
@faldrian not sure how many other podmins do this, but even as a solo pod maintainer…all of my files/assets are stored on S3 anyway.
@tomscott I know podmins that have their pod on their own machines, so that they keep physical control of their hardware.
I think, we should make linking with existing photo-managing-sites more easy and flexible. So that users can upload there and access from here. Saves disk space on server…
One thing that might be a nice feature would be an API integration for sending and storing photos to places like MediaGoblin or TroveBox, but we’d need to get an official API going for Diaspora first.
I agree with Sean, offloading the management of photos to a service outside of D* could be an option Why recreate functionality provided by these free/open services being developed just for the purpose?
Given that TroveBox tries to make it easy to import your photos from other places, there’d probably no need to additionally support the various non-free/open photo services directly.
With MediaGoblin integration we wouldn’t be limited to posting photos, but could post videos & sound, or maybe even any type of media MediaGoblin can handle - that would be something.
It would be no trivial task to get all that working smoothly and at least MediaGoblin’s API does not seem to be exactly stable.
Oh, that pesky API again…
An external service sounds like a good idea!
I would prefer following features:
-Implemented usage (no external site to login needed)
-privacy (!) related trustful service
I like idea of albums. Don’t want to change my mindset.
Also mediagoblin might be a good idea as stated by others
I do not agree here, I think we need a way to organize photos, even posts, in diaspora. And that’s what tags are for. For me, what we need is a way to make queries on posts.
So an “album” could be simply all the photos with the #fosdem2013 tag, or #fosdem2013 && posted_by(fla). These kind of queries are completely needed.
Social Networks are often used for sharing photos. Diaspora is the place where I organize my relationships in aspects so it would be nice to use these aspects as acces control to certain lists of photos (e.g. albums).
So either external services can integrate into the concept of aspects or this feature has to be put directly into Diaspora*.
I use and want to use d* as my social network and I don’t want my fotos being outsourced fo another hoster.
Therefore I upload fotos on diaspora and having albums would help me organizing them.
For example upload many pictures in an album and sharing this in a post. At the moment there’s still a bug: You can upload as many pictures as you want - all are shown in “fotos” on the profile - but only the first eight pictures are shown in the post.
And many people ask for this feature. Especially users coming from facebook are missing it.
I think we need a photo album feature inside diaspora. Optionally it could be outsourced to other services.
Definitely some kind of photo-album viewer but tags to organise them more effectively is also important.
Diaspora is so great because it’s decentralized and you own your data. It would be great to have photos managed that way. Outsourcing the albums could be a nice addition, but I think it’s very important to also have it done properly in Diaspora.
I would recommend to go via facebook style albums.
Why don’t take advantage of albums and tags?
I think that tag search would be done also restricted on photos and adding a photo (and video) section where to organize the content by album
Hi!
Finally time to join the discussion
I need to say, as a photographer, albums is a must have! And some kind of efficient tagging system would make the whole thing even better. To not only come with demands I would like to suggest a, at least temporary, solution as well.
I would suggest implementing an album into the user profile and then link to a photo, or album, in the according post. It would be cool to be able to link likes and comments to photos/albums but I don’t really know how this should be done. Then I would not sync photos between pods but rather, as it is done now, hotlink them. This is both more efficient and gives the user better control over her/his data.
I would like to give some attention to the openphoto project as I see their software as a solution for our albums. They support comments, likes and do even have a tag system. I think you can also release albums to a limited group, this could be paired with Diasporas aspects. It would be cool if someone with more coding skills would look into this and check whether it’s possible for us to use that software or not!
http://theopenphotoproject.org/ and of course it’s open source.
Hope we can use this or similar software. That would decrease our work and speed up the process of implementing albums.