[KPhotoAlbum] Idea for quick search feature

[Shawn Willden]

On Wednesday 25 April 2007 03:05:37 pm Jan Kundrát wrote:
> People:Jane & (People:"Paul Verlaine" | People:Bob) &
> Exif_Image_Make=Panasonic AND Exif_Photo_ISOSpeedRatings >= 250

This looks eerily like what I was considering, with the following differences:

1.  As I mentioned when I started this thread, values without any sort of 
field specifier are allowed and search all metadata (with the possible 
exception of EXIF data).
2.  There's no need to specify '&', it's implicit.  Where it's made explicit, 
I was thinking to use 'and' and 'or', rather than symbols.  I suppose both 
could be allowed.
3.  I would eliminate case sensitivity.  I think the value of case-sensitive 
matching is small in this case, and the value in avoiding confusion for 
non-geeks who don't think that 'A' is any different from 'a' is significant.  
Actually, I think it would be good to make matching a little fuzzy to allow 
for misspellings, but that's clearly beyond the present scope.
4.  To allow for incremental searches and searches where the user isn't sure 
of the spelling, category searches would match partial tags.  So "people:ja" 
would match images tagged with your name.  Perhaps quoting could override 
that, so 'people:"ja"' wouldn't match "Jan".  That would overload the meaning 
of quotes and make partial match searches on strings containing 
non-alphanumeric characters impossible, but I think that's okay.

I agree that if we decide to go this route for the search bar (which is far 
from certain, even in my mind), it would be good to harmonize the syntax.  
However, I also feel pretty strongly that my decisions above are more 
friendly to non-geeks.

One other thing:  I think it really would be good to come up with a syntax for 
expressing "People:{this exact set}".  Maybe that's not a bad syntax, 
actually....

	People:{"Paul Verlaine", Bob}

One think I'm not so sure about is the use of ':' and '='.  Maybe it's better 
to always use '='?

	Shawn.