Coming from Picasa Desktop - help

[Boudewijn]

On Saturday, October 15, 2016 9:04:39 PM CEST Hans-Peter wrote:
> On Sat, 15 Oct 2016 20:43:52 +0200
> Simon Frei <freisim93 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Sat, 15 Oct 2016 09:01:49 -0700 (PDT)
> > bjnovick <bjnovick at msn.com> wrote:

> > > I tried to simulate how Picasa does albums by using tags and just 
> > > creating a tag called "ALBUM - XXXXXX" for each of the albums we have
> > > and then having her use the tag view.  However, in Picasa my wife could
> > > sort the albums by date or other properties. 

> > For this use case I use tags. So I have a root tag called usage and then
> > several tags relating to presentations, galleries, events, ...
> > Thus you can use the tags left sidebar and select this tag to see all
> > these images. In that sense this can be understood as a "virtual album".
> 
> Correct, thats also what i do (and the OP). Works more or less fine.
> 
> But tags are written to the images or xmp files and thus trigger backups.
> And if you have lots of tags, you probably don't want even more tags. These
> tags then may have same names, e.g. i have 'river' and 'calendar/river'
> which makes typing tag names slightly less comfortable. 
> If you want to show all images with a tag, you either search or select a
> album tree root and filter for the tag. Works, yes, but not as comfortable
> as simply selecting an album.
> 
> For me, it does therefor not feel right to use tags for this.

It is not an issue for me, but I can recognize the use of being able to filter 
and sort tags more extensively than is possible now. The first two points you 
mention (backups, duplicates) I think are side effects that one could come 
around. 

The issue actually mentioned by bjnovick can not so easily be worked around. 
Advanced search gives a lot of options to find images, and one could save the 
search as a virtual album (thus not needing tags as virtual album per se), but 
it still lacks this 'meta sorting' ability. I do not know Picasa, so maybe the  
text below is totally besides the point ;-)

All filtering and search options I can think of, help me to zoom in to a 
specific image, but not multiple specific groups of images (take, "all those 
images in the first week of all past holidays"). 
To take this convoluted example further: imagine I wished to have an album for 
each first week of every holiday, I could add a tag "first week of the 
holiday". I start sorting, filtering and searching all my images, working from 
now back to the past. I apply two tags each time: "FWOTH" and a filterable 
timetag, ccyymm. Each album is defined by the intersection of those two tags 
(FWOTH and 199807. Ah, the first week lasted from 19980728 to 19980804, 
anyway, lets not make things more difficult)

Next week I recall that I want to show you the FWOTH-album that I had been 
working on at the end of the evening, so I know it must be far in the past. 
Now what? Filter on tag FWOTH and date "everything before 2004"? That gives a 
whole bunch of pictures, but not an easy way to bring up the 5-star virtual 
album (I don't want to give each picture 5 stars, and tags don't have meta-
properties).

Looking at the tags-table, I imagine it difficult to start adding this 
ability. Am I looking in the right place at the data/database/
dbconfig.xml.cmake.in ? It says:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS Tags (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, pid INTEGER, name 
TEXT NOT NULL, icon INTEGER, iconkde TEXT, UNIQUE (name, pid)) 

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS Tags (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL 
AUTO_INCREMENT, pid INTEGER, name LONGTEXT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin 
NOT NULL, icon INTEGER, iconkde LONGTEXT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin, 
lft INT NOT NULL, rgt INT NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT Tags_Images FOREIGN KEY (icon) 
REFERENCES Images (id) ON DELETE SET NULL ON UPDATE CASCADE, UNIQUE(pid, 
name(100))) ENGINE InnoDB; 

Could you give some examples of how virtual albums are used in everyday life? 

Best regards,

Boudewijn