The Everlasting Picture Categorizing Project

[Nick]

I think it might be cooler then Tuesday to be able to sort on two vectors. One being day/month, grouping all the images from a time span together with breaks between time spans (kinda like windows picture library does for days) and then pick another item to sort by. Though this would be pointless if the other sort term was always date taken as that would be the default.  But ordering them by size or quality as well might be nice. ...Now that I have said it I'm not sure how useful it would be without getting strangely complicated (sort by elevation, sort by distance taken from my house)    

[zourtney]

I agree. Multiple search terms and multiple sort terms would be awesome. Nearly necessary. However, it should probably not be the default action. For 80% of searches, a single sort/order term will suffice.

For example, you would usually only need this level of detail:
All images; tagged with "swimming pool" and "barn door"; order by date asc

I vote that any more complicated controls can be spun off into its own window or change the look of the sort/search toolbars (which I hate in my example, by the way...it needs to be totally different and better). Call it Advanced Search, or something similarly lame.

[Brad]

I think there needs to be some UI method for determing on which dates you actually have pictures for. If I want to go lookup pictures from our camping trip last year, I don't want to have to search through a whole bunch of dates to figure out which one we actually went on. I also don't want to have to search through the a whole years worth of pictures just because I don't remember the exact date.

So, what I am proposing is some sort of date UI which shows you the dates you have pictures for and allows you to select said date there by showing you all images taken on said date. (Ok that was dumb language). This UI might just be a calendar where you highlight the dates/months which have pictures for them, I dunno. I just think we need something like that.

It doesn't have to be crammed onto a sidebar/toolbar or anything it could be in a pop-up window (non-modular) you bring up by pressing a button or something.

[zourtney]

Ok, draw one up. VB, C#, MS Paint, napkin and a sharpie, whatever...Just throw up your concepts. It'll help, I'm sure.

[Nick]

I like that calendar idea.  Have a normal looking calendar with an icon or a few thumbnails to show that a day or month has pictures that were taken on it. Makes it quick and easy to see when you have pictures and when you don't. There might be something like that for the drupal gallery soon.

[Brad]

Just looking at your UI mockup.... What is the Tag Managment toolbar?

I mean, you pretty much just either add or remove tags right? Unless this button brings up the awesome list of tags where the size of the text is related to the number of images with that tag.

I really really really don't want to have to press a button to add a tag. All you need is a text box where I can type in a bunch of words, hit enter and have them added as tags. I should also be able to see what tags an image has. Both of these things could go in your PLAH PLAH PLAH section.

I don't really care if I have to open a pop-up dialog in order to delete tags, but you could probably get away without doing that either depending on how you display the tags in the PLAH PLAH PLAH section.

EDIT:

Also, I really think the program screen should be wider. I don't think there is any reason at all for a two level taskbar at the top. You should be able to fit the search bar, sort by, display mode and sort order buttons all on one line.

I'm not sure about the other buttons, but they seem kinda large and annoying. I do like the overall layout though. I'll try to get around to doing a stupid mock-up sometime.

[zourtney]

Most of that ugly thing I gave up on was me trying to figure out how to lay out controls using .NET's newer old stuff. Anyway, the Tag Management junk: I was thinking we need a screen (or something) that can display all of the tags in the system. No matter how smart the program is, you'll want to be able to browse through them, delete useless ones, merge typo'ed ones together. That sort of thing. At the very least, you'll want to be able to see a list of what you've got.

It was, by no means, meant for adding tags to the system. That action should be totally transparent to the user. (So should deleting unused tags)

[Nick]

Agreed

[zourtney]

Oh, in regards to the giant toolbar buttons:
The images I found were not good ones, but I picked gigantic icons on purpose. They're easier to hit and, if we find good images, they're easier to decipher quickly...basically, make all of the functionality as big as possible, without getting in the way.

But alas, I don't know what buttons we need.
So....

Required toolbar-sounding-ish functionality:

• import folder into library
• simple search
• link to more advanced search
• change sort order (asc/desc)
• change group by (date, rating, ?)
• change search parameters (given by list of tags?)
• get properties of selected items (range of date taken, tags in common, average rating?)
• link to a way to view all tags in the system
• link to a way to view all managed folder in your "library"

That's just simple stuff that I can think of being useful along to top of the app. What do you think?

[Brad]

Can I have a button to show my calendar popup which shows the dates you've taken pictures?

Otherwise I think that about covers it. Next to figure out is the bottom info/control bar.

[zourtney]

Duly noted on the blah.

As for the bottom bar, I think I'd be into a "tag cloud" type thing. I demand to know what tags have been applied to an image or set of images by simply clicking on them in the main pane. It should be unobtrusive but immediately distinguishable (ie -- not super tiny and hidden 4 clicks away!)

If I click on a bunch of camping pictures, I should see something like this (We should probably arrange them alphabetically, but all that markup is in the way now, so whatever):
camping woods water stream lake tree cheese sasquatch dirt hunchback green toyota honda blazer pichole

Since the tags in search results would differ in quantity and weight, we may want to tweak the cloud idea a little. A slightly different spin that comes to mind is: make "heavier" items more bold (kerning?) and have more frequent items larger (bigger font). Or swap those...or! tricks with color/alpha values.

Just an idea, but I think the tag cloud idea is essentially a good one...plus, it's entrenched in society and I can't think of anything innovative.

[Brad]

We'll have to think of a way to handle the enivatable image with too many tags to fit into the space. Will you cap the number of tags (no)? Will you have some sort of scrolling box allowing you to view all the tags easily (maybe)? Or do you have some other genius idea which allows you to have near-infinite tags space (I dunno)?

[Nick]

Scrolling text box, scrolling tree hierarchy, dynamically shrinking text to punish people who cant seem to categorize a picture in the space allotted , ummm a 'more' button that add more space when needed (though that should be easy to do automatically when the box is full) and are we talking a space/comma separated list of terms or a multi-select tree or individual boxes to enter terms into? I personally really like hierarchical trees but they are a little much for the average user. Though we could make a default one that they could later add to if we failed to provide a default tag for something. Like say they are adding a person/place/thing then the program could add it under the correct branch of the tree (less specific then the premade ones but it would work, But then they could list all the tags that are places or people or animals or whatever depending on the granularity we use)

[zourtney]

Ok, obviously we need to clarify the basics of out tag system. This is what I was thinking.

• tags are simply a name and an ID, which is hidden to the user
• tags applied to images are weighted. Heavier = more relevant; lighter = less relevant
• the backend should be written so that, at some point, we can implement tag-to-tag relations. For example: dog, cat, lion, and bear associate with animal
• all of that complicated tag relation stuff will be a pain to administer, from a user's standpoint. I think this would be fairly useful, implementing a flat tagging system would be a better place to start...otherwise I'll drown in taxonomy theory and become apathetic. But again, I want to build the backend with this idea in mind.
• weighted or named tag-to-tag relationships would be more flexible. It could also be more fun for browsing your collection, if we have a related-tag browsing mode. For example, I might tag angle grinder as 4% dog related..!

[Brad]

This tagging system seems like it's gonna be really complicated. Is anybody actually going to tag all their images this exhaustively?