Allow to create a filesystem-like album hierachy

[Tanguy Ortolo]

When storing photographs on their computer, some people, if not all, use a filesystem hierarchy, for with paths like pictures/photographs/2012/10/mountain_hiking.

When publishing photographs on the Web, some people (well at lease me!) need to be able to define a similar hierarchy, that has to be available from the website home page to allow people to browse it easily. Here are several use cases.

I took pictures from a mountain hike, with a bunch of people. Later, I took pictures from a free software meeting, with very different people. I want to be able to publish both series of photographs and give them the address, but my hiker friends have no interest in the other photographs, and neither do my developer friends. Also, some of them want to download the full-quality pictures (as a single archive file because HTTP offers no practical way for mass-downloading) of the single event that interests him.

I participated in a pilgrimage, where several people took photographs. I want to be able to give them an access to a dedicated album, so that each photographer can upload his pictures to a dedicated sub-album.

Some of my friends are interested in my photographs, but most of them are more interested in what I do, in the activities I participate in rather than in the individual pictures. As they go to my website from time to time. To be able to determine what event I shot, they must see an appropriate, chronologically-oriented hierarchy so they are not overwhelmed by bunches of hundreds of new photographs.

I hope that was descriptive enough; if you want an example of such a hierarchy you can visit my website <​http://photos.ortolo.eu/>. The most complete application of that hierarchy is <​http://photos.ortolo.eu/tanguy/2012-07-22-lourdes-gavarnie/>, where the path is composed of: a user name (me, because that website also hosts pictures from another member of my family), a date and event name, and under that one sub-album per photographer.

[Tanguy Ortolo]

Most other systems implement such a feature. This is the case, for instance, of Picasa Web, Flickr (not sure if they implement sub-album), Gallery 2 and 3 and PhotoShow.

[Tanguy Ortolo]

Maybe I was not clear enough: that would be an enhancement, but a necessary one for MediaGoblin's success. Without that, people looking for a picture publishing software will try MediaGoblin, wonder how they would classify their pictures, find that they is no way to do so, and uninstall it and try the next piece of software they can find.

Have a look at the existing MediaGoblin instance, for instance <​https://gobblin.se/>: pictures in bulk, in chronological order but with no usable structure. Want to look at pictures from a travel to somewhere three months ago? Next page, next page, next page (…) until you find them or give up.

Social features are cool, and probably necessary if you want to offer something with enough novelty to succeed, but they are secondary after this basic feature: being able to organize one's pictures. Remember that people often take tens of pictures during a week-end, hundreds of them during a week of holidays, which means thousands of them a year. Can you imagine an album with thousands of pictures in bulk with no organization other than chronological sort? I guess you can, but believe me, normal human beings cannot use that, they will simply give up.

Now, I have been told that there is some kind of category feature in MediaGoblin. While this is a start, as it is currently it is not enough: to be usable, regular users should be able to create sub-albums without thinking, and to display them, with a sub-album jacket chosen among the pictures inside it, on the main page. Otherwise, even is the feature is there, it will not be used and people will look for another piece of software instead of MediaGoblin.

[Matt Molyneaux]

I think collections fulfill most of what Elessar has described. Linking to collections to already possible, e.g. ​http://gmg.theperplexingpariah.co.uk/u/moggers87/collection/ksp-0-23-5/

We need three things before we can close this issue:

• Collections should be first class objects (with a thumbnail etc.)
• Collections should be able to contain collections
• Collections should be displayed on the front page (difficult, but worth it imo)