Larry, On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 1:43 PM, Larry Bradley <[email protected]>wrote:
> I switched from Windoze to Ubuntu a while ago, and recently started > using Shotwell for my 2500 or so photos. I like it a lot. > Great to hear! > > Many years ago I wrote a Windoze program to catalogue my photos (using > Visual Foxpro, a database language). It has two features that I would > like to see in Shotwell. First, a photograph could be assigned to a > "category" (e.g. "Grandchildren", "Family" etc). It has the ability to > select only those photos in a category. > > Second, and most useful, is a "description" field into which I entered a > comment about the photo (e.g. "Fred, Sam and Mary at John's thirty-ninth > birthday party"). The program allowed for a full-text search (e.g. show > me all the photos having "john" and "birthday" in the description. > > Some of this can be done using Shotwell's tags. For example, I wrote a > PHP program to add tags for the categories to the photos database. Now I > can select all the photos in the "Family" category. > This makes sense. By the way, in the next release (0.10) we're planning to implement hierarchical tags in Shotwell - see http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1401 . That could also help here - for example, you could have tags for each child ('Sue', 'Jeff') and each of these tags could live under a parent tag 'Children'. > > I also added all the words from the description fields as tags, so I can > find all photos with "birthday". That seems odd to me. Hopefully you know that Shotwell already allows each photo to have a title, which you can change. You can use View->Titles to see these and Photo->Edit Title to change them. Shotwell's text searches will match all words in the title. So in Shotwell today it might make more sense to set the title to its "description" in your previous database. > The upcoming Boolean search capability > will make this more useful. > > However, their are problems with tags. The first is that they are > case-sensitive (John and john are different tags). Yes. We'd like to make them case-insensitive - see http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2391 . That's trickier than it sounds since existing databases might have tags which differ only in case and we would need to merge those when the user upgrades, but I hope we'll get to this before too long. > And there are far too > many of them in the tag list now - hundreds in fact. > Right. Again, I think you probably want to set each photo's title rather than making a separate tag for each word. > > If the tags were not case sensitive, then they would be quite useable as > my category field (although my program allowed for sorting by category). > > The description stuff is easy to handle in the database. SQLite supports > full-text search (although it needs to have the support compiled into > it, which I just did for testing). > > A "description" window could be added (just like the Tag window, > although larger). Then a full-text search window could be added. > We actually do want to extend Shotwell so that it will have both titles (as today) and descriptions (which can be several lines long). See http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1573 Once we've done this, searching should match any photo with the given word in either its title or description. We also need to think a bit about how descriptions will be read/written from EXIF tags and other metadata; there's some information about this at http://trac.yorba.org/wiki/PhotoTags > > I have the Shotwell source and the Valac compiler. I'd like to take a > look at doing this myself, and if it works, then the authors of Shotwell > could look at using it. > > I could use some tips as to where to start looking in the source to make > these kind of changes. I've been browsing through the Shotwell docs, but > if any of the authors would care to point me in the right direction, I > would really like to play with his a bit. > I guess the first think you need to decide is whether the existing title mechanism is good enough for your needs. If you'd like to work on adding separate descriptions as well (#1573), we'd be happy to have a patch for this feature. I think it would make sense to have a multi-line text box in the Basic Information pane in the lower left where the user could view and/or edit a photo's description. Hopefully you've already found the architecture overview at http://trac.yorba.org/wiki/ShotwellArchitectureOverview . You should certainly also read the PhotoTags page I mentioned above and think about how to serialize descriptions to EXIF/IPTC/XMP in a way that maximizes compatibility with other photo applications. Cheers - adam _______________________________________________ Shotwell mailing list [email protected] http://lists.yorba.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/shotwell
