taken from the Whatās Next page.
Album creation and editing (which is really just editing tags rooted at Albums) is a prerequisite for sharing.
@rick78 had a great suggestion: that albums should have a āchosenā or āexemplarā image for a given album.
Let me share my opinion about what can be included inti this feature. Some of following subfeatures can be workarounded by external software, so should have less priority:
- Form an album:
a) either mark assets manually with the tag
b) or create a saved search query (kinda computable tag) - Share an album:
a) authentication (can be workarounded using reverse proxy)
b) separate url to view the album - View the album:
a) both read-only and editable views make sense
b) with editable view it would be great if all modification will be made by creating tags in separate place (sandbox) and then merged down into library after premoderation
Why do I need moderation of modifications?
My library contains photos from the whole large family, shot by multiple people with plenty of cameras in different situations. And there is no single person that can keep them sorted. But PhotoStructure is great with its ability to view all of them in single place. I am going to just administer the storage and software, delegating some of tagging to other people. But Iād like to ensure that the whole tag system is consistent, each tag means the same across the library, and stars assigned by different people can coexist. So, I need to perform some batch changes before merging review results.
Sandboxing for reviews can be implemented in different ways: either with core support by creating sidecar files in separate folder, or āchrootingā into tag hierarhy (allowing to modify tags only starting from ā/Reviews/Robert/review239/ā).
I just want a simple album system so I can review photos I took on vacation, and put all the ones I want to print into an album.
Iām afraid this feature is getting feature-bloated (manual and smart albums, sharing, rights management, exemplar photo, etcā¦) and will never see the light of day 
2 Likes
Iām not sure if youāve seen this topic: Support editing asset keywords
But, the bottom line is that manual album management and editing keywords is the same thing. I know @mrm has been working hard on the next release, which is (as I understand it) focused on some behind-the-scenes improvements. Iām hopeful that after that heāll be able to get back to developing new features, as editing keywords is my most wanted feature.
Thanks for your feedback, @tkohhh, @Klutz , and @mburyakov, and welcome to PhotoStructure!
Yup, thanks for being patient! I added some more details about what this work entailed here: Initial library build - processing pauses - #2 by mrm
Absolutely, and I think keyword editing is the lowest-hanging fruit for ātag editingā: it arguably gets this feature request addressed, at least as a first pass.
1 Like
I just want a simple album system so I can review photos I took on vacation, and put all the ones I want to print into an album.
This is the exact use case I was about to create a topic for, so I will instead just add my support here.
My wife likes the pinning feature in Picasa3 as a good example of UX. She scrolls through or searches for images, then pins them to the tray, then just exports the tray when sheās done. She can then upload them to whatever service we are using to print photobooks or send them to a funeral service or whatever.
The tray selection is ephemeral but good enough for what sheās doing. I think that more than one click to add a photo to the tray/clipboard/album gets tedious when youāre working through a lot of them.
Thanks for the reminder of that UX!
I agree, the ephemeral group (Iāve seen it called a ābasketā I think to riff off of peopleās familiarity with e-commerce sites) is super useful to quickly gather arbitrary groups for editing or downloading or whatever.
1 Like
To summarizeā¦
It would have saved me a few hours if https://photostructure.com/guide/albums/ clarified that:
XMP-xmpDM:Albumdoes not support multiple albumsCollections.CollectionNamemay be written by digiKam and some other tag editors, but unclear how by defaultXMP-dc:Subjectworks fine with hierarchical tags prefixed byAlbum. While other applications may not treat these as albums, as least theyāll be displayed in most applications.
Longer story
I was confused on how I ought to tag albums for wide platform compatibility. I can use exiftool to actually add the tags, but which ones do I add?
Per How does PhotoStructure populate the Albums tag? | PhotoStructure
PhotoStructure reads album titles from these fields, in order:
Albumā the XMPAlbumtagCollections.CollectionNameā MWG 2.0 Collections, written by digiKam and some other tag editorsalbumData.titleā Google Takeoutmetadata.json(one per album directory; applies to every photo in that folder)Nested / hierarchical albums are supported: write
Vacations|Paris 2019as theAlbumvalue (or use the nested form in MWG 2.0 Collections) and PhotoStructure will place the photo underAlbums/Vacations/Paris 2019.
I definitely want to be able to add a single photo to multiple albums, so that rules out the XMP Album tag. Collections.CollectionName sounds promising, but I installed digiKam and by default an āalbumā is apparently a file folder? I copied an image to two albums, and that copied the image to two filefolder locations. I am not particularly interested in having duplicated or symlinked or similar filesystem shenanigans just to have multiple albums for a single asset. albumData.title is out because thatās just Google Photos; it seems very unlikely to be super portable.
Seems to me really the only universally-supported metadata is XMP-dc:Subject. I tried adding subjects testMerge, Album|test, Albums|test, Albums|test2, and Albums|test|nested using Exiftool, and it does what Iād expect. The asset ends up with three summarized metadata, combining the singular/plural album/albums and duplicate hierarchies for Albums / test / nested, Albums / test2, and Keywords / testMerge.