[KPhotoAlbum] order criteria for a family photo collection

[Robert L Krawitz]

   From: Heinz Kohl <kohl at informatik.uni-stuttgart.de>
   Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2007 11:05:03 +0100

   Am Dienstag 06 Februar 2007 22:55 schrieb jedd:
   > On Wednesday 07 February 2007 4:06 am, Michael J Gruber wrote:
   >  ] I don't want to be nitpicking, but 
   >  ] The sorting, otoh, appears to be very limited: sort by date (ascending
   >  ] or descending) and manual sort.
   >
   >  You're quite right.  

   Yes, KPhotoalbum has nothing which might be called 'sorting' beside
   the wish to find unique time stamps to make up a primary time key.
   Sorry, but exactly to set up this mechanism is called 'sorting' in
   KPhotoalbum, beginning with the initialisation ("Images are not
   sorted" because of "incomplete (time) dates"), and I used this
   elsewhere unusual naming just to be understood.  To have no
   (unique) primary key is resulting in "will only work suboptimal" -
   and that's the case not only when "navigating using the date bar".

"Sorting" and "grouping" are two different things, even if they both
use keys.  In some cases, it makes sense to group on a key, but
sorting isn't particularly meaningful.

   >  I think a lot of us have similar, and possibly equally
   >  'non-standard' sets of photographs .. so I'll be curious to see
   >  how others react to this problem description.

   That can be expected to be the case for most image collections.
   It's well known, that less than 5% of all photo imaging worldwide
   is done in family imaging.  Look at photo collections of buildings
   (including details), coins, plants, stamps, drawings, ships,
   watches, autographs, soccer players and so on.  O.k., time stamps
   are often necessary, but most times not of main interest.  Most
   collections are having own inherent primary keys - to sort plants
   with main respect to photo date instead of Linne's ordering system
   would be as crazy as sorting family pictures in respect to an
   ordering scheme for animals.

Sort, or group?  It makes sense to group photographs of plants based
on their taxonomy (and thanks to hierarchical groupings, the groupings
could match the biological taxonomy), but it doesn't make a lot of
sense (to me, at any rate) to *sort* on that basis.  Sorting implies
an ordering; I don't see how that makes sense in these terms.

   Is there any necessity to pack aunt Nelly between page 135 and 136
   of a bible's page collection because of the image date?  Is there
   really any necessity to manage the picture of your ancestors in
   tight connection e.g. with an historical car archive, or to get the
   connection between the old testating aunt and e.g. vultures or old
   furniture?

No, but it makes perfect sense to group all of the Aunt Nelly shots
together, and KPhotoAlbum supports that quite well -- select all of
the Aunt Nelly photographs.

   E.g. I could use such a program to make a better chronological
   ordering of my pictures, and without the repetitive need to
   explain, why I've abused time for a plain numbering while setting
   up some very imperfect replacement.

As Jesper pointed out, you can turn off the chronological sorting and
arrange the images however you please by dragging them around.  I
suspect, though, if you actually try to do this you'll find it more
difficult to come up with an ordering than you would expect at first
glance.

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net
Project lead for Gutenprint   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton