On 04/26/2011 12:26 PM, Vincent wrote:
I should admit that I do not see the interest of the "events" vs
"directory".
The advantages of directories are the following:
- it is a standard used by a lot of others applications (Picasa, Canon
Zoombrowser, Windows Live Gallery,...)
- even if I do not use a photo manager, your photos can be easely browsable
with any File-browser
- when I export them on a USB stick or CD/DVD or UbuntuOne, the folder
structure help me to find a particular photo/event quickly
- If I decided to leave Shotwell for another application (I can't imagine
but you never know ;-) ), I will keep all my folder structure which will
allow a smooth migration.
...
The advantages of the events in Shotwell are:
?
Anyone can help me to understand?
There's a high-level design question here. Should Shotwell's primary
tree view show the directories where photos are located? Or should it
show photos organized by time (with time boundaries set by the user,
i.e. events), independent of photos' locations in the filesystem?
When we started developing Shotwell, this was a fundamental decision we
had to make. Some other photo programs such as GThumb show a directory
tree revealing where photos are stored. But in Shotwell we decided to
present photos by time and mostly hide their filesystem locations from
the user. We did this because we think that a time-based view is
fundamentally useful in a photo program, but some people might have
their photos organized in directories in some other way. In other
words, we wanted to separate the presentation of photos from their
physical location to maximize flexibility for the user. Also, photo
directory names are not always appropriate for displaying to the user
directly. People might reasonably store photos from October in a
directory named "10", but we really want to display the name "October".
There are disadvantages to this approach. In particular, when you
organize photos into events in Shotwell, photos don't move in the
filesystem; instead, all the event data is stored in the private
Shotwell database.
Recently a number of users have been asking for a tighter relationship
between Shotwell events and photo directories. I think that's a
reasonable request, and I'd like to move incrementally in that
direction. I don't think we'll go so far as to replace the event tree
with a directory tree, for the reasons I mentioned above. But I'd like
to get to the point where Shotwell can rearrange the photos in your
library directory to match your preferred directory structure and keep
them arranged that way (http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2170) and, if you
wish, you can have one directory per event with the event name in the
directory name (http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/3549). Similarly, if you
change a photo's date in Shotwell, it should move in the filesystem
(http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2824) and probably move to a new event as
well (http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1940). I currently expect that even
with these changes, Shotwell will only arrange photos in the library
directory. If you import from outside the library directory without
copying, then photos will still appear in the event tree, but will
always remain in their original locations on disk.
Feedback is welcome. These changes will certainly not all happen for
0.10, but could perhaps arrive later this year.
adam
_______________________________________________
Shotwell mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.yorba.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/shotwell
