[Shotwell] Shotwell 0.5 Impressions of a New User

[Bruno Girin]

On Fri, 2010-06-18 at 07:31 -0700, Adam Dingle wrote:

> > - if allowing file system view, events do not need to be renamed.  Events become a date view.  Events should be the file system view... no?
> >    
> 
> This is a Big Question and is debatable.  Once we have a file system 
> view, it's true that you could simply arrange photos into directories 
> based on their time and rename the directories to have event-like 
> names.  With that usage pattern, events simply become a date view and 
> there's no need to rename them.  Many people might want to use Shotwell 
> this way, but some might want to use a different directory organization 
> but still have independent renameable events.  I'm reluctant to take 
> away a feature that people may be using and like, so I think we'll 
> probably still allow events to be renameable even after the file system 
> view is implemented.

I'm one of those people who like the feature of having an event view
that is de-coupled from the file system. The reason for this is that the
file system view would give me a pure chronological view of photos while
the event view may not. Furthermore, if you implement hierarchical tags,
you could also consider implementing hierarchical events, which wouldn't
work too well if events were tied to the file system.

I'll give you an example that may end up being quite messy if the event
and file views are the same:
      * Let's say I'm going to the Wimbledon tennis championship that
        starts on Monday and spans 2 weeks (so I may go on several
        days), I would want to group all my Wimbledon photos into a
        single event. But then in between Wimbledon photos, I may take
        other photos (after all, over 2 weeks, that's very likely). If
        the event and file system views are the same, I lose the actual
        chronology of the photos (unless I have an additional
        chronological view that is not linked to the file system).
      * Then say that I want to create hierarchical events so that I
        group my Wimbledon photos according to the matches I've seen: 1
        top event for Wimbledon, 1 sub-event for the Federer - Falla
        first round match, 1 sub-event for the quarter-final, etc. If
        event and file system views are the same, there's bound to be
        quite a lot of activity on disk before I'm done.

The whole benefit of having a database is to be able to create a logical
arrangement of photos that is independent from the file system storage.
If you have both an event and a file view in Shotwell, it's then down to
you, the user, to decide whether you'd rather use the event or the file
view as your primary way of interacting with the software.

This then becomes even more complicated the day Shotwell introduces the
concept of People and Places views, the same way as F-Spot does, or the
concept of user collections (like Rhythmbox or iTunes playlists). In
that case, which scheme should you follow when storing photos on disk?

My last reason for keeping the file system arrangement as it is that it
is the simplest arrangement that guarantees I won't have any file name
clashes. All files coming out of my camera have a name in the form
IMG_XXXX.JPG (or .CR2) where XXXX is a number between 0000 and 9999.
Once I reach 10000 pictures (I've done that once so far), the counter
resets so I may have two different pictures with the file name
IMG_1234.JPG in my collection. With a pure date-based chronological
arrangement at the file system level, I can be sure that those two files
will reside in two different directory. With any other naming scheme, I
may accidentally have a name clash. Of course, that doesn't solve the
situation where you have 2 camera bodies but it still makes a clash very
unlikely :-)

If the argument is to ensure that the event information is stored
independently of the Shotwell database, I would say that it should be
stored in the photo meta-data so that you can copy the photo around and
keep the event information whatever happens.

My 2 pence,

Bruno