As I use PS more, I continue to find things that I really like about it.
As I am curating my photo/video images (using digiKam), I upload my curated results to SmugMug where I can further create smart albums for certain collections I think would be of interest to my family and close friends. One feature SmugMug has that I really like is the concept of related tags.
For example, if I am viewing a photo tagged with “john” and I know John is married to Sally, I can add a related tag of “sally” to view a collection of all items tagged with “john” and “sally”. I do not see any easy way to replicate this in PS. I know I can search for kw= but honestly, for family and friends, this isn’t very intuitive. The SmugMug implementation is very intuitive and easy to use.
The PS search bar should also be simplified for non-tech users. Having a global search capability (i.e.: search the requested item in description, title, keyword, etc. fields automatically) would make search much easier for non-tech users. You could retain the tag specific search capability for those technical users so inclined.
And as mentioned in other posts, provided a geo-location map capability would also be helpful for those items with geo-tags.
I don’t know if you’ve clicked the icon in the middle of the bottom of the page on asset views:
that toggles the “asset stream” view, which is the only real relationship I’ve thought about with respect to tags: it’s the other “nearby” assets: where “nearby” means that they are also associated to any tag for the current asset.
The only other relation I’d thought of before is via tag hierarchies, but what you’re suggesting would be in addition to this.
It’s been a while since I’ve used SmugMug. How do they handle related tags? (I could only find this help page).
Agreed. Know that the nerdy “namespaced” search terms (like kw:beach) is totally optional: just searching for beach should work as well (and find any asset in any directory with the word beach in it, as well).
I like the stream feature and I have used it. It is useful but feels one dimensional when it comes to keywords. For example, if I select “Who/mike” and I open streams, I can see other “Who” relations where “mike” appears. However, if I want to see “Who/mike” combined with another keyword (i.e.: “cruise”) I can’t do that.
Searches of photos I do will often include a person/place/thing after which I want to easily combine it with another term like an activity (hiking/cruise/car) or a sub-category (yard/kitchen). Here is an screen grab for the way SmugMug deals with it.
From this screen grab, I searched for “eastern caribbean” (location). I then added the related keyword “cruise” which then displays all pictures with both terms. From here, I can easily add/remove additional keyword tags and further adjust my photo collection. This makes it very easy to drill up/down in my photo collection based on keyword topic of interest.
@bdillahu, SmugMug does provide a nice tag cloud to begin with. Piwigo is another application that uses a tag cloud. Just my opinion, but for casual visitors to a large family/friends photo collection, tag clouds can work well because the words can prompt a memory. Time based searches are fine but I often find myself remembering events or other keyword oriented topics more than time based ones.
