Support for manually created albums

taken from the What’s 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 “chosen” or “exemplar” 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:

  1. Form an album:
    a) either mark assets manually with the tag
    b) or create a saved search query (kinda computable tag)
  2. Share an album:
    a) authentication (can be workarounded using reverse proxy)
    b) separate url to view the album
  3. 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 I’d 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 ‘chrooting’ into tag hierarhy (allowing to modify tags only starting from “/Reviews/Robert/review239/”).

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.

I’m afraid this feature is getting feature-bloated (manual and smart albums, sharing, rights management, exemplar photo, etc…) and will never see the light of day :frowning:

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I’m not sure if you’ve 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. I’m hopeful that after that he’ll 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 “tag editing”: it arguably gets this feature request addressed, at least as a first pass.

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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 she’s 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 she’s doing. I think that more than one click to add a photo to the tray/clipboard/album gets tedious when you’re working through a lot of them.

Thanks for the reminder of that UX!

I agree, the ephemeral group (I’ve seen it called a “basket” I think to riff off of people’s familiarity with e-commerce sites) is super useful to quickly gather arbitrary groups for editing or downloading or whatever.

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