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When you import a folder into Digikam, it displays the folder structure in the "Albums" section. It would be nice if this folder structure could be converted into a heirarchy of tags automatically. At the very lest, having somewhere in the menus "Folders to Tags" (probably under "tag" or "batch"). Better yet, being able to right-click on a folder in the Albums section and have the option to convert that folder and all its subfolders to tags.

Exactly. I have my photos in folders like ~/Pictures/Vacation/Colorado so it would be nice if Digikam would automatically give them the tags "Vacation" and "Colorado".

My idea is more that it would give them the tag "Vacation/Colorado", that is the hierarchy of the nested tags matches that of the folder structure.

I see. Not what I was looking for, but still a good idea.

The files would still get the "Vacation" tag, but the "Colorado" tag would be a sub-tag within the "Vacation" tag. If you didn't like that, you could just drag the Colorado tag into the root of the tag structure so it is no longer under the vacation tag.

Of course, it could be configurable which way it works.

TheBlackCat wrote:hierarchy of the nested tags

As far as I understand the idea of tagging, getting rid of tree like model is number 1.
Whats the point to have tags that gives almost the same info as folder tree?

Coming back to folders -> tags idea, I definitely agree that such conversion is a good thing.

But when we live in computes age - why we should do jobs, that computer could do without any interaction of human?

Extending my Discounting ratings idea, tags could be auto-ranked too, user submitted tags has great rating, auto tags has low.

Going further, some kind of auto-tagging/ auto-managing system could be the key point in battle between openWorld and m$. And tags should not only apply on separate sub-systems like contacts or photos, but must be integrated together for fast and easy search of any content.


p.s. If you have any thoughts about why and how Discountable Ratings idea, please comment on that post

Lukas wrote:As far as I understand the idea of tagging, getting rid of tree like model is number 1.
Whats the point to have tags that gives almost the same info as folder tree?

2 things:

1. you can view all the pictures in all sub-tags of a given tag, but you cannot view all the pictures in all sub-folders of a given folder.
2. It can be used as a starting point for further tagging. For instance, say I have a picture that fits into multiple places in my folder structure. I put the picture where I think it belongs the most, but if I use this I can import the folder structure I already set up, then go about adding additional tags to get everything in every place it belongs. I can use symlinks for this in the folder structure, but that is a lot more difficult.

TheBlackCat wrote:1. you can view all the pictures in all sub-tags of a given tag, but you cannot view all the pictures in all sub-folders of a given folder.

Could you tell me what do have in mind by sub-tags?
Like searching for samp tag would find both:
Summer/camp/photo.gif
Winter/camp/photo.gif
[/quote]

Also, what is your opinion about auto-taging?

If you look at the the tag manager, you can either specify a tree of tags, for instance by writing "tag1/tag2", or you can drag and drop a tag onto another tag. If you select the parent tag, you can see all of the pictures in the child tags. You can also set a picture to be a part of a parent tag and not a child tag. It is like a folder hierarchy, except each picture can be part of multiple hierarchies simultaneously.

As for auto-tagging, I think it would be useful if it could be pulled off, I just don't know if it is feasible yet. Computers are fairly good at doing what we tell them, but they are not very good at figuring out what we want them to do without them being told.

TheBlackCat wrote:If you look at the the tag manager, you can either specify a tree of tags, for instance by writing "tag1/tag2", or you can drag and drop a tag onto another tag. If you select the parent tag, you can see all of the pictures in the child tags. You can also set a picture to be a part of a parent tag and not a child tag. It is like a folder hierarchy, except each picture can be part of multiple hierarchies simultaneously.

But you cant set to have child tag but not parent

Lets say we have 6 files with tags:

Summer/Beautiful Trees.jpg Summer; nature
Summer/Camping/Camping at summer.jpg Summer; Camping; Me
Summer/Sports/Windsurfing at summer.jpg Sports; Me; Summer
Winter/Camping/Camping at winter.jpg Winter; Camping; Me
Winter/Sports/Camping at winter.jpg Sports; Winter; Jon

If you select the parent tag, you can see all of the pictures in the child tags
Yes summer will select 3 pictures.

You can also set a picture to be a part of a parent tag and not a child tag.
Beautiful trees has only Summer tag

TheBlackCat wrote:As for auto-tagging, I think it would be useful if it could be pulled off, I just don't know if it is feasible yet. Computers are fairly good at doing what we tell them, but they are not very good at figuring out what we want them to do without them being told.

Yes and No.
Discounting tags idea could minimize the this problem.

In small tag clouds a few additional tags does no harm

In large tag clouds usually tags with least tagged with them are hidden under Show all or similar buttons, so tags with low rate would not be shown and doesn't bother you. The only problem I see is up to 10 bytes used to store tag-item relation.

Lukas wrote:But you cant set to have child tag but not parent

No, that would defeat the whole purpose of having nested tags. You could have a separate tag with the same name, though.

Lukas wrote:Lets say we have 6 files with tags...

Yes, that is how it works.

Lukas wrote:Yes and No.
Discounting tags idea could minimize the this problem.

In small tag clouds a few additional tags does no harm

In large tag clouds usually tags with least tagged with them are hidden under Show all or similar buttons, so tags with low rate would not be shown and doesn't bother you. The only problem I see is up to 10 bytes used to store tag-item relation.

That still doesn't solve the problem of how to determine the tags in the first place.

TheBlackCat wrote:

Lukas wrote:But you cant set to have child tag but not parent

No, that would defeat the whole purpose of having nested tags. You could have a separate tag with the same name, though.

Well, we could leave nested tags feature as optional. Users who don't want to have nested tags, simply uses all tags in parent level, no children - no problem

TheBlackCat wrote:That still doesn't solve the problem of how to determine the tags in the first place.

Get all possible information
The way I look at tags is more like WordPress uses taxonomy
http://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description

They keep in the same table all data, and uses another table to describe what this data mean. This allows to separate user submitted tags and auto-tags, Still leaving an option to to use all data at the same time - like a search box drop down helper start typing and get all possible option to find by


Import media dialog could have a tab Auto-Tagging

Use this data to auto-tag items: (Checkboxes)

• Folder structure [|||...............] <-slider, how important this data is
• EXIF data [||.................]
• Location (if GPS data present) [||||||||||........]
• Names (Find faces in photos) [||||||||||||||...]
• etc

Lukas wrote:Well, we could leave nested tags feature as optional. Users who don't want to have nested tags, simply uses all tags in parent level, no children - no problem

My idea would not change anything about how tags are used, it would just provide an easy way to add tags.

Lukas wrote:Get all possible information
The way I look at tags is more like WordPress uses taxonomy
http://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description

They keep in the same table all data, and uses another table to describe what this data mean. This allows to separate user submitted tags and auto-tags, Still leaving an option to to use all data at the same time - like a search box drop down helper start typing and get all possible option to find by

The problem is how the program can determine what the data means in the first place.

Lukas wrote:Import media dialog could have a tab Auto-Tagging

Use this data to auto-tag items: (Checkboxes)...

This should probably be a separate idea. It is getting way more sophisticated than what I am suggesting. It also would have to happen during image import, while what I am talking about is applied only to already imported images.

TheBlackCat wrote:The problem is how the program can determine what the data means in the first place.

Lets say you read EXIF data, crawler will now the title of the input like Model
would add tag/taxonomy entry

title: DC210 Zoom (V05.00)
type: exif-model
auto-tag:true

TheBlackCat wrote:It also would have to happen during image import, while what I am talking about is applied only to already imported images.

Tools -> (Batch ->) Regenerate tags?
Right click -> Tags -> Get tags?

TheBlackCat wrote:This should probably be a separate idea. It is getting way more sophisticated than what I am suggesting.

I think it is better to came up with quite polished idea before posting new thread, despite this could get offtopic.



Anyway, I think such tagging system must be a shared component across KDE, even akonadi, like tagging for users (if somebody writes to you from info@... it is 99% is is business contact), etc


As it gets more sophisticated, I hope some devs could join this discussion.
Doing this right could be kick-ass feature even against mac, not talking about windowz

TheBlackCat wrote:The files would still get the "Vacation" tag, but the "Colorado" tag would be a sub-tag within the "Vacation" tag. If you didn't like that, you could just drag the Colorado tag into the root of the tag structure so it is no longer under the vacation tag.

Of course, it could be configurable which way it works.

Ah sub-tags, of course! I'm sorry, I misunderstood, I'm not used to tagging through Digikam. I wrote a BASH script that takes user input and assigns that to the EXIF/ITPC/XMP tags through the exif-tool utility to embed them in the file, and those standards don't seem to support sub-tags persay since they're just plaintext.