I do not agree here, I think we need a way to organize photos, even posts, in diaspora. And that's what tags are for. For me, what we need is a way to make queries on posts.

So an "album" could be simply all the photos with the #fosdem2013 tag, or #fosdem2013 && posted_by(fla). These kind of queries are completely needed.

Social Networks are often used for sharing photos. Diaspora is the place where I organize my relationships in aspects so it would be nice to use these aspects as acces control to certain lists of photos (e.g. albums).
So either external services can integrate into the concept of aspects or this feature has to be put directly into Diaspora*.

I use and want to use d* as my social network and I don't want my fotos being outsourced fo another hoster.
Therefore I upload fotos on diaspora and having albums would help me organizing them.
For example upload many pictures in an album and sharing this in a post. At the moment there's still a bug: You can upload as many pictures as you want - all are shown in "fotos" on the profile - but only the first eight pictures are shown in the post.

And many people ask for this feature. Especially users coming from facebook are missing it.

I think we need a photo album feature inside diaspora. Optionally it could be outsourced to other services.

Definitely some kind of photo-album viewer but tags to organise them more effectively is also important.

Diaspora is so great because it's decentralized and you own your data. It would be great to have photos managed that way. Outsourcing the albums could be a nice addition, but I think it's very important to also have it done properly in Diaspora.

I would recommend to go via facebook style albums.

Why don't take advantage of albums and tags?
I think that tag search would be done also restricted on photos and adding a photo (and video) section where to organize the content by album

Hi!

Finally time to join the discussion :)

I need to say, as a photographer, albums is a must have! And some kind of efficient tagging system would make the whole thing even better. To not only come with demands I would like to suggest a, at least temporary, solution as well.

I would suggest implementing an album into the user profile and then link to a photo, or album, in the according post. It would be cool to be able to link likes and comments to photos/albums but I don't really know how this should be done. Then I would not sync photos between pods but rather, as it is done now, hotlink them. This is both more efficient and gives the user better control over her/his data.

I would like to give some attention to the openphoto project as I see their software as a solution for our albums. They support comments, likes and do even have a tag system. I think you can also release albums to a limited group, this could be paired with Diasporas aspects. It would be cool if someone with more coding skills would look into this and check whether it's possible for us to use that software or not!

http://theopenphotoproject.org/ and of course it's open source.

Hope we can use this or similar software. That would decrease our work and speed up the process of implementing albums.

I'm glad Mediagoblin has been mentioned. I've donated part of my server to them for development. I think that GMG and Diaspora would be perfect partners. GMG has it over other systems, because it supports so many formats. I mean Youtube is great, but its not Opensource. Nor is it anything more than video. Now with Google looking to monetize even more of our personal content, I would be very wary about using something we cannot control. GMG supports Audio; Video; Images; Text; 3d Models... Could we ask for anything more?

D* really needs that API done. I know the devs struggle with it, but its the biggest thing holding back D*. Even if D* does not change for the next 2 years (apart from bug fixes), an API will push it to the next level.
I guarantee that there would be a huge outpouring of support from both sides of the fence if the API was completed. Even if it were just rudimentary.

Photo albums do play an important role in building the argument for a "social network". I don't think anyone will take the difficult path of joining diaspora + joining other sites for sharing photos. They can simply join any other existing social networking site where they can upload photos and share them in the same platform. And, from my experience, chat and photos are the two features that still forces users to stick to conventional social networking sites like Facebook even if they are aware of privacy infringement.

Why can't we have a photo album that has privacy options similar to posts? Each photo is a post that can be commented/shared.

+1 for albums

We should deal with that smartly, and use tags to regroup posts containing photos. We could also possibly use the old beta profile, which was really nice to display images.

I'd like to add three things:
1) I completely agree with Balasankars last post.
2) An advantage of a tagged-post system over a directory system is that you can easily put one photo in multiple albums.
3) As a fix for the problem of adding new contacts, I propose the following: when you're viewing one of your aspects (i.e. the list of people in it), every contact would have a field for setting the point in time after which posts in this aspect are visible to the contact. By default, this time is set to the moment when you added the contact to the aspect, but you could move it back in time.
It would also make sense then, that, when you remove a contact from an aspect, he would remain there (greyed out), but with another field added, stating the time of removal (unless no post were made to this aspect during his being-in-it).
Finally, I think it would make sense if the poster could see which aspects he posted a post to (e.g. when hovering over "limited" - this information is already stored anyway, since you can filter your own posts by viewing different aspects). These features combined would make it 100% trackable whether person X can see post Y.

Have started a proposal to keep things moving.

@nickdowson "or the ability to use tags in a way that very much mimics albums" - in which situation you should vote "yes"

@macieklozinski - I'd rather have albums. Even if from a technical perspective or for non beginner users they are in fact tags! Or both.

Just to clarify, the UI could present photos sharing tags in a form that looks like an album. The question here is what is used to group photos into ‘albums’ (or whatever UI presentation is used) on the screen: do we use tags or do we get the user to place them into static albums which are then fixed. If we use tags to do this, there could be the option for the user to edit the tags so that the photo would then appear in different ‘albums’.

I know, the proposal is finished, but …

what does this Facebook album UI looks like?

However, I miss a link /photos (or similar) to see all photos, I've ever posted. The organising is secondary to me.

However, I miss a link /photos (or similar) to see all photos, I’ve ever posted.

Click on 'View all' by the photos in the sidebar of your profile page to see a list of all photos you've uploaded.

Ah, nice. Wasn't aware of that! Thanks, @goob!

Glad to help. The photo stream is very basic and needs a lot of work.

I see. Repeated images … Hm, have to dig in further added to todo

There's a bug which was introduced by 0.3.0.0 that makes the photo stream 'endless' and repeats photos. Will be fixed asap.

One UI could be, for example, a list of photos filtered with the tag #family from my profile.

I imagine something like this:
When I look in my profile, I click on "View All" to see the photo stream, then at the side or up appears a list of used tags on my photos so you can filter all that stream. Or, instead a list of tags, a simple textbox where you can type the tag.

Can be posible something like that? is that difficult to implement?

Is there any news on this topic? I do think this is a key feature if we want Diaspora* to appeal even to people who don't really mind about privacy.

Uploading photos is one of key features of every social network. When I upload photos on Facebook, it's usually either one photo, or 20+ photos album. Latter is still not possible on Diaspora.

..all we need is someone to jump in and code this thing :) Who is up for it?

Maybe donate something towards the feature on BountySource? That might get someone to jump on it earlier.

Hooray, yet another 'I can haz?' proposal. We decided before that we would like to use tags to organize photos. All we need is someone who implements it.

Now you created a new proposal which says

Add support to create albums, similar to Facebook.

What does “similar to Facebook“ mean? AFAIK Facebook doesn't use hashtags to organize photos. How should they be organized instead? Should this proposal overrule the decision we made about a year ago? How do we federate the organization of photos “similar to Facebook“?

Oh please, albums are much better.

I'm not sure what the policy is on repolling about settled issues, so I weakened to disagree.

This vote is irrelevant because we've already voted on and decided a way to organise photos - with tags. Vote all you want, but it won't make any difference.

I just wish everyone would read the guidelines on using Loomio before starting discussions/proposals... they are linked on the home page of this group, so it's not easy to miss them.

Hooray, yet another ‘I can haz?’

There's never enough ! :D

Are you going to implement this, Lemon? No? Than please don't start proposals. Especially not for topics that already have found a decision. If you're not going to implement this feature, maybe you want to create some mockups and present them here. As I see you prefer albums and the community prefers tags for photo-organizing. Maybe these concepts can be brought together and look just like albums, but be technically tags instead. What do you mean?

First I agree that the current poll is not relevant enough and need to be refined.

But speaking of governance, the present debate raise some questions. The decision was taken one year ago, but the feature has not been implemented since. That means that the code remains basically unchanged concerning photo management, isn't it? It seems to me that it may be useful to make a new poll in order to verify the opinion has not changed. Diaspora*, as every community, is a dynamic system. Especially, I guess a bigger part of its users come from Facebook, and even more are expected to come: don't we have to take this into account? The point is not to do the same thing as Zuckerberg did but to take advantage of positive external experiences (and improve them). A new poll does not seems absurd to me:

• In case of the same answer, we would confirm that the decision which has been taken is still relevant, and should definitely be implemented,
• In case of a different one, it would give the opportunity to correct the direction before any implementation, and so better fit users expectancies at a minimal cost.

@rasmusfuhse: What I meant by "like Facebook" was that it should be familiar to user who's coming to Diaspora from networks like Facebook or G+. Users expect to be able to upload more photos and put them in album. Other people expect to easily find albums on users profile. Tags don't allow spaces and tagging albums like #MyTripToSpainIn2015Polaroids looks messy.

Actually you wouldn't tag albums, you'd tag pictures directly. You could tag them as #spain #2015 #polaroids, but the #2015 tag is useless, if we can use the metadata of the photos to collect all photos you took in 2015. So the tags #spain and #polaroids would remain.

I'm all fine to align our design on the typical facebook user-experience. That is perfect. But the former proposal says "tags not albums".

I started a wiki-page for creating a concept for this issue. I hope that this concept will make it easier for developers to know what they could or should implement, when they try to implement this issue. I guess, we can also break this issue down to a few issues that might be more easily be implemented than the whole thing.

https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Organising_Photos

The decision was taken one year ago, but the feature has not been implemented since.

That is purely and simply down to a lack of people developing features for Diaspora. Those few who are developing are busy working on more fundamental things. It is not because there's a lack of certainty about implementing this feature as agreed in the previous vote.

@goob : I agree with you. My point is: there was no lack of certainty one year ago. But now the community has evolved, and it may be useful to question this again, to keep being in phase with users needs.

I think before 'asking the question again', one would need clear evidence that the previous decision is no longer applicable/appropriate for the project, or clear evidence that there is overwhelming support for a different decision. Otherwise we're just pissing in the wind here in Loomio.

@rasmusfuhse I've edited your wiki article for English and clarity. Hope you're happy with what I've done. Please check I haven't changed your meaning unintentionally with my edits.

Good stuff @rasmusfuhse !

I'm thinking, could the first step be just visual - so a UI that would just group photos into "albums" based on posts (with uploaded) photos with hashtags? This way, it's really just a way to view photos for posts so just a different type of stream.

Visibility obviously can be taken into account as you mention by looking at the aspects.

What I'm saying is, I'm not sure why we need to relate photos to hashtags, since posts already have that relation? We can always cache the streams in advance, but the data relations are already there.

Now if users want to like or comment on photos directly - things become different. I doubt that is going to come in the near future.

@jasonrobinson the difference is, when you have several postings with your photos: one posting tagged with #spain #polaroids and another posting with #italy #polaroids and another one with #spain #blackwhite images. In your approach this means three albums, which are the exact same as the postings. I thought of the tag-feature als seeing each tag as an album, so that would make one album #spain collecting all photos from posting one and three and another album #polaroids which collects all photos from #spain and #italy which are #polaroids and so on. The difference is, that one photo can be in different "albums", which are in fact only tags but look and behave like albums.

I am not saying, that your approach is better or worse, but it is right now not the outcome of the first proposal here.

Your point is not bad, that when we display a photos as a single object, maybe people want to comment or like these photos as single objects and not as the whole posting. I'm not sure, if we should put this in the wiki-concept-page right now or if this is another feature.

Also Goob added to the wiki page:

Enable a user to change the hashtags associated with an individual photo ''after'' it has been uploaded.

That is not an unimportant point. Especially when you think of this photo feature not as a new stream or view but as "organising photos" like this thread is named, it is important to edit the tags of the photos independently from their postings. For example I upload several photos with #spain #polaroids in my posting and later I want a single image, which displays an ocean-coast to be also tagged with ocean, because I'd love to collect all my photos of oceans, where I have been.

By the way, thank you Goob! Help is always welcome.

@Rasmus: Very good points, I agree.

Thanks, Rasmus. Sorry I forgot to mention that addition to the wiki article in my previous post.

Maybe I have misunderstood something but I can't see why we have to choose between albums (which are basically folders, aren't they?) and hashtags.

I personally classify thousands of photos on my computer : I indeed use keywords to be able to reference them and easily find every photo related to #ocean or #family or anything. But these photos are also primarily grouped into folders that generally correspond to the event. Both ways are complementary, but grouping them into folders appears to me as the priority. It is also what make more sense when looking at somebody else's pictures : if I want to see holiday pictures of my friend, I am not interested in viewing only #beach photos or only his #food ones : I would more likely want to have an overview, including all the places he visited and activities he did in a chronological order (and I am probably not interested in viewing again his #beach photos taken the year before in another place).

It would definitely be a good feature to associate hashtags to photos, but why not being able to group them into folders first?

Here is what would make sense to me:

• having a folder named Uploaded pictures where all the pictures posted in my stream would be stored by default (keeping the link to the original post could be useful since sometimes the photo doesn't mean anything without the initial comment)
• the ability to create other folders (albums) such as Holidays in Italy where I would be able to store some photos
• a system of hashtag that works as filter over all the folders. It would allow me to fetch all #beach pictures for example, and allow general referencing on Diaspora (in accordance with the privacy settings)

Hope I'm clear enough, and thank you for the wiki page!

The point of the previous vote is that hashtags will be used to organise photos (into 'albums' if you want to call them that). You would group them into 'folders' by associating hashtags with them. In your example, someone could then click on #holiday2015 (or a combination of #2015 and #holiday) to see all the photos from that holiday. If they wanted to see only the photos taken on the beach during that holiday, they could add the #beach tag as a filter. The photos would appear to the user to be in an album, but that album would be created by use of hashtags.

As Jonne Haß said above: the question is not whether to do this, the question is how to achieve it. The decision taken is to use Diaspora's existing #tag system to organise photos into albums. This means the albums will be dynamic and more flexible: a photo can be part of more than one album, and if you want to move a photo from one album to another, just change the tags attached to it. (At least, that's how I envision it working.) That's why the outcome said 'use Diaspora’s #tag system to organise photos rather than using Facebook-style static albums'.

What you have written in your previous post is pretty much the outcome of the previous vote. That's why the new proposal is superfluous.

OK, understood. ;-) You also said previously that

one would need clear evidence that the previous decision is no longer applicable/appropriate for the project

I agree with you, and I tried to get a clear view of the reasons that lead to the decision. The problem is that in previous vote (and discussion), the only visible arguments are the one of people that voted against. What are the real advantages of such a system, only based on hashtags? Albums would then be dynamic, OK, but what is the advantage of that?

I can notice from the experience of new friends arriving on D* that the use of hashtags in posts is far from being intuitive. I fear that managing photos that way would be even more complicated. I can't help thinking that it is absolutely essential for a tool such as D* to remain very user friendly. Then every complicated (or at least not usual) feature has to be supported by strong arguments. I can hardly see anything of that kind on this topic. I'm not pretending there are'nt, just saying they are not clear to me.

Note that there is a discussion on github preceding this one. There, you find the argument that tags&filtering combines better with aspects than a folder system.

Ok, thanks, I know that. I'm sorry to insist, but even there I still don't see any clincher. The advantage of being able to put a picture in multiple albums is nice, but not sufficient to put aside the classic album way.

The advantage of being able to put a picture in multiple albums is nice, but not sufficient to put aside the classic album way.

That's fine for you to feel that, but understand that the Diaspora community already agreed to do just that, and now all that's needed is people to code it.

That's sad we cannot have an argued discussion on that issue and keep things moving...

You can discuss, of course. But if you define "keep things moving" that the community must agree on your "albums are better than tags", than you're wrong. Do you think, we missed any argument of yours?

The advantage of being able to put a picture in multiple albums is nice, but not sufficient to put aside the classic album way.

Note that there are more arguments in the github discussion than just this one.

@rasmusfuhse “keep things moving” -> It seems strange to me to see something that has been voted a long time ago and still not implemented to remain definitively locked ("Diaspora community already agreed"). Diaspora community may have changed, and users expectancies too. So why don't we poll again (not every month, but once a year on such an important topic seems reasonable to me)?

Then I am not exactly saying that “albums are better than tags”. I think personally that indeed they cannot replace them, and that they rather are complementary. So I would prefer to add them to the album feature. But that is my personal view, and thus not the most important. My point is that

it is absolutely essential for a tool such as D* to remain very user friendly. Then every complicated (or at least not usual) feature has to be supported by strong arguments.

And again, (sorry @dremodaris ), I don't see such clinchers.

Whether they are clinchers is subjective, but the following quotes combined constitute, at least, an argument:

flaburgan

But if we give full album access to every new person in the aspect, will you remember that you give access to this album one year before? You know, the one with awesome birthday pics? Now, you add your mum to this aspect, and magically she discovers this album. This is typically the kind of stuff we want to avoid in diaspora*.

jhass

And that's then gets confusing, two of your friends sitting together looking at an album and noticing that one can see photos the other can't, in the same album. Therefore my suggestion to not implement albums, but a nice view for all photos that were shared with filters based on the hashtags in the associated posts.

So if you stick to your opinion, I think you have to answer these concerns.

On the first point : as far as I understand, the tag system would require privacy settings for any picture independently. It is also possible to have this fine tune for independent pictures sorted in folders, doesn't it? Concerning privacy management, you proposed earlier a nice way to do the job, which seems applicable to both picture organisation systems (and could be extended to all posts, in my opinion).

The problem of the two friends looking at your pictures is the same as those same friends looking at your whole profile : they will also notice they don't see the same posts. I don't understand why this problem is specific to pictures, and why sorting them using tags instead of albums would solve the problem. I see it as the normal consequence of using aspects.

I more or less agree with what you say, but then an individual picture has everything in common with a post, except that it has a unique "album" associated with it. Now, this uniqueness is more of a restriction than a feature, and if you drop it, then an album is no different from a tag. Perhaps in the context of photos, there could be a user interface that makes tags look a lot like albums, but I think tags are more flexible than albums in every respect, so I don't see the added value of introducing a new organisational concept of albums.

Also, I disagree on your premise that tags are difficult to understand for users. GMail has them, Thunderbird has them, Wordpress blogs have them... It is a quite well-known concept by now.

Mmmh I'm not sure we have the same idea in mind. Let me describe what would make sense to me (very basic proposal actually):

• having a folder named Uploaded pictures where all the pictures associated to a post would be stored by default. It would basically be the same content as the "Photos" item which already exists on people's profiles (keeping the link to the original post could be useful since sometimes the photo doesn't mean anything without the initial comment)
• being able to create other folders such as Holidays in Italy, where I would be able to upload some photos (or move them from another folder). For each picture, I would be able to add a caption and some tags if I want to. My friends would be able to drop a comment.
• a system of hashtags that works as filters over all the folders. It would allow me to fetch all #beach pictures in the folders I have access to, and allow general referencing on Diaspora (in accordance with the privacy settings as well)
• individual privacy settings for every picture that are in Uploaded pictures (inherited from original post), and then one setting per created folder

Main differences with conventional posts are : we can upload several pictures at once, storing them in folders which are easy to find and to browse. These folders could also be a simple tool to manage privacy settings, easy to understand, and easy to check in one glance.

Counterproposal: We can upload several pictures at once, tagging them with tags that are easy to find and use as filters. These tags could also be a simple tool to manage privacy settings (make all photos with tag T available to aspect A), easy to understand, and easy to check in one glance. ;)
Tags could do anything folders can do, and if necessary, tags could be made to look like folders by making some tweaks at the UI-level. This would be a second step with much less priority.
Of course folders can form hierarchies, but you could have tags of the form #tag:subtag:subsubtag.

Basically, I think folders can be built/mimicked based on tags, so that organizing photos using tags is a very sensible first step.

you could have tags of the form #tag:subtag:subsubtag

Ok, good point, I haven't thought about it.

But sorry, I still think playing with tags is much less intuitive for most people (we have to keep in mind that people like you and me, spending time on Loomio and gitHub or mastering Markdown are not representative of the average population), and I'm afraid it would rapidly getting messy. With tags you can easily create mutually exclusive conditions without notice, for example.

Then how would we deal with big picture collections: I click on the profile of some friend of mine that has hundreds of pictures referenced with hundred of tags. How would things be displayed: a list of hundreds of tags and one has to pick some randomly? Or a page with hundreds of photo thumbnails and filters at the top I have to try one after another?

And what if I upload dozens of holiday pictures and forget to give them a common tag?

I think that system is very convenient to retrieve your own photos, since you know which tag refers to what (that's the way I use for the pictures I take). But when you jump into somebody else's collection you need a clear view of the hierarchy since you don't have a clear idea of what you are looking for or which pictures are present.

Globulle, all your arguments can be used to say, that albums are unusable by the users.

How would things be displayed: a list of hundreds of tags and one has to pick some randomly?

I now just replace one word with another: How would things be displayed: a list of hundreds of albums and one has to pick some randomly?

And what if I upload dozens of holiday pictures and forget to give them a common tag?

And what if I upload dozens of holiday pictures and forget to [add] them [to] a common album?

Tags have two main advantages over albums:

a) They are more flexible, because a photo can have more than one tag. If you prefer having exactly one tag per photo (like it would be with albums), then you can use tags just like this.

b) Photos can inherit the tags from the postings, they are uploaded with. So even a user who never ever visited the dedicated photos-section in diaspora, but only posted stuff, might have a well tagged bunch of photos.

And now what if a user uploads trillions of photos and adds thousand of tags? Well, the same user might get into trouble with albums as well.

Of course you can implement albums quite nicely so that they work fine for most users. But the same applies to tags. You can display tags exactly like you might have displayed albums to the user.

and I’m afraid it would rapidly getting messy.

I agree that tags like #thisisasentencewithoutspaces:subtag look messy. Perhaps, especially in the context of photos, it would be worthwile to find a way to make tags look more appealing. However, I think much of this can be done at the UI level. E.g. we could allow tags like #{this is a sentence with spaces}:subtag and then make them look like colored boxes or so; both while typing and while viewing.

With tags you can easily create mutually exclusive conditions without notice, for example.

Could you rephrase?

a list of hundreds of tags and one has to pick some randomly?

I'd say the viewer could choose to sort them alphabetically or by prevalence. Perhaps the profile owner could also create a list of "favourite filters" or something like that.

I think that system is very convenient (...)

This argument is entirely applicable to albums.

Photos can inherit the tags from the postings, they are uploaded with.

I think this is an excellent idea.

@globulle

So why don’t we poll again (not every month, but once a year on such an important topic seems reasonable to me)?

Because unneeded bureaucracy isn't helping anyone. If a lot of the community has changed, fresh discussion presents a new idea, a developer wants to implement it in an alternative way, then it will probably happen anyway - no need to poll just because a certain amount of time has passed. :)

Oh, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but I get the feeling that people aren't really discussing proposals but rather letting out whatever ideas they might have in their head on the keyboard.

Maybe you could be productive and write down some concepts on how the different systems would work? We need well thought-out concepts if we're going to discuss the which, how and why, and that includes tag-based systems.

@rasmusfuhse I don't agree with your objections, especially on the first one, since the problem of having hundreds of albums would be much less frequent than just having hundreds of simple pictures

@demodradis : what I meant by mutually exclusive is for example : tag T1 is only visible by aspect A1, and T2 is only visible by aspect A2, thus applying both T1 and T2 would make pictures hidden from everybody. Such situations are not clearly noticeable, and may become annoying when using dozens of tag/aspect associations.

But never mind, thank you for your explanations that really helped me to conceptualize what the idea of tag would be. You almost convinced me! :-)

I sum up some points our discussion has highlighted (hope we agree on):

• we should be able to upload several pictures all at once
• photos would inheritate tags from the postings
• the system has to be very intuitive, so the UI has to be designed carefully (and mimic albums to some extent?)
• tags have to appear in a clear view (the colored boxes seem good to me)
• we should propose solution to keep a hierarchy (such as #tag:subtag:subsubtag, e.g. #2014:Summer:HolidayInItaly)
• having a way to suggest "favourite tags", or "metatags", to guide watchers

I would also make a suggestion : keeping in some way the chronological order of upload. That seem important to me, since most collections make more sense when viewed that way. Maybe some automatic tagging could be implemented at upload, such as #upload:timestamp. Also, I think some generic tags could be proposed by default, as it is often done in photo management softwares (#friends, #family, #nature, #party, #holiday...) to help new users.

I agree with @ivangabrielmoren we should write down some concepts on the wiki.

I have posted a concept of how organising images using tags might work in Diaspora, with some mock-up screen shots. Have a look and comment on the post in Diaspora. Once it has been refined through your comments, hopefully we can make a detailed proposal here in Loomio so the way forward will be clear for any developer who wants to build this feature.

https://pod.orkz.net/posts/b1bb32d0326101345bc000163e5dbca2

or append /posts/b1bb32d0326101345bc000163e5dbca2 to your pod's domain to view it in your own pod, so you can comment.

Here’s the proposal in full so that people don’t have to visit a link to read it:

This proposal is for a user viewing their own uploaded photos; the filter feature could also be made available when viewing someone else’s photos, with some changes.

First, a word on nomenclature: I’ve used ‘photo’ and ‘album’ below, but it’s worth thinking about what terms we actually use. It might be more appropriate to use ‘image’ instead of ‘photo’, as not every image is a photo; and there might well be a better term we can use instead of ‘album’.

Please note that I’ve only shown three images in the mock-ups to save work, but the examples I give assume the user has uploaded a lot more!

To the current view of uploaded photos, I suggest adding the means to filter uploaded photos according to the tags added to those photos. This could be done by either:

• Adding a ‘search’ bar to enable filtering of photos. When text is entered into this search bar, it will auto-complete according to the tags set for the images in the view.
• Showing a list of all the tags added to photos in the view. Clicking on these tags then filters the view by those tags.

Here’s the first mock-up:

If wanted, these combinations of tag filters can then be saved to create ‘albums’.

Let’s say I want to group the photos from my holiday in France this year. So I set three filters: #holiday #france #2016. When one or more filters has been set, the view changes as follows (I’ve used a pop-up window here):

The tags I have already set appear at the top, and only the photos which have these three tags are shown in the filtered view. Let’s say 58 photos are included in this set. The other tags (not in the current filter set) which these photos have are shown below each photo.

Underneath, there is a list of all additional tags attached to the photos within the current filter, along with the number of filtered photos to which each tag is applied (e.g. ‘#friends (31)’). The user can click on one of these tags to add it to the filter. When this is done, that tag is added to the top and removed from the list at the bottom, and the photos displayed are filtered accordingly. E.g. if I click ‘#beach’, 19 photos will now be in the filtered stream, and the list of extra tags might read

#sea (8) #friends (7) #beer (3)

Let’s say that #mountains, #restaurant and others disappear from the list because no photo is tagged with both #beach and one of those.

If a user thinks a particular combination of filters makes a useful collection of photos, they can save this to create an ‘album’. I suggest that when the Save button is pressed, a pop-up opens which enables the user to give the ‘album’ a name. When a user has created one or more ‘albums’, the links ‘All photos’ and ‘My albums’ will appear above the main photo stream.

If I click ‘My albums’, a view containing each of the albums I have saved will be displayed, showing the album name and a cover image (the first image in the album, or we could enable the user to choose a particular image as the cover image).

If someone else is viewing my photos, this heading should read either ‘Albums’ or ‘goob’s albums’.

Related issues

Related issues which are out of the scope of this proposal, but which would be very useful, are:

1. The ability to add tags to and remove tags from photos after uploading.
2. The ability to add an already uploaded photo to a post after clicking the camera icon in the publisher.
3. The option to wrap Markdown around an image when uploading it, perhaps with a pop-up to add alt-text or a caption; and the ability to select where this image will appear in the post by using the cursor in the publisher.
4. Preventing a photo from being shared outside of the scope which it has been given (perhaps except by the person who uploaded it).

Another thing which might be worth considering is:

1. The ability to publish images to specific aspects outside of a post.

There’s my idea. I hope it makes sense, and look forward to hearing what you all think of it.

goob

That sounds great @goob !

One part I did not understand:
"Additionally, a list is shown underneath of all other tags which photos in this set have, along with the number of photos which also have each tag (e.g. ‘#friends (31)’)"
What is meant by "all other tags which photos in this set have"?
Now that I thought about it I guess "set" is referring to the currently filtered collection of images.

To me then, however, one should also have the ability to add individual pictures to an album. The way described by goob is great when you want to create an album of your vacation in france. But what if you were to create an album of "Favorite moments in all my holidays". That could be difficult to accomplish via tag filtering. Except if you were to add a #favorite tag to them all. That however feels like a workaround and therefore is not so user-friendly.

What if this "filter view" could serve as a means to add pictures to albums. You'd filter by tags "#bar #night #france #friends", select the pictures in the "filter view" (e.g. by drag-selecting them) and drag'n'drop them into an album.
Sketch (sorry, only got paint on this PC..):

@timoses

One part I did not understand:
"Additionally, a list is shown underneath of all other tags which photos in this set have, along with the number of photos which also have each tag (e.g. ‘#friends (31)’)"
What is meant by "all other tags which photos in this set have"?
Now that I thought about it I guess "set" is referring to the currently filtered collection of images.

Yes, that's exactly it. I mean additional tags assigned to the photos within the current filter. That's a better way to phrase it - I have edited my proposal accordingly, and hope it's clearer now.

To me then, however, one should also have the ability to add individual pictures to an album.

That's a good idea. How about this:

Add an 'Add photos' button to the filter view. Any photos added by this route would automatically be assigned the tags in the current filter, which is a means of 'adding the photos to the currently viewed album'.

There could also be a UI to 'add photos to an album' along the lines of your suggestion and sketch.

Add an 'Add photos' button to the filter view. Any photos added by this route would automatically be assigned the tags in the current filter

Hm? But in the filter view if you look at filtered images they will already have the tags that you are filtering for.
It sounds like your proposition is that albums should be mere collections of tags. Am I right? But as I mentioned above, it seems like an ugly workaround to create albums. To an ordinary user who doesn't know the technical site it would probably seem odd to add extra tags to an image only to have it in an album.

Hm? But in the filter view if you look at filtered images they will already have the tags that you are filtering for.

Sorry if I haven't been clear. The suggestion you quoted is to add the tags from the filtered view to any new images uploaded within that view.

It sounds like your proposition is that albums should be mere collections of tags. Am I right? But as I mentioned above, it seems like an ugly workaround to create albums. To an ordinary user who doesn't know the technical site it would probably seem odd to add extra tags to an image only to have it in an album.

Please see the previous vote, in which the majority decision was to use tags to organise images in exactly this way.

Ah okay, I was not aware of that.

So in the end what specifies an album is that all images in the album have at least one same tag? At least that's how I'd create an album:
1. Think of an album name: E.g. Trip to Cannes
2. Collect images that go there
3. Tag all these images #TripToCannes
4. Specify #TripToCannes to be an "album tag"

Other use case:
1. I'd like all butterflies that I photographed in India in one album
2. -> Specify an album that has only #butterfly #india

So, I guess the key here is to create a very user-friendly interface.

Necessary features:

• Create album and specify album tag(s): Images with that tag will automatically be listed in that album
• Select images that should go into an album
  • either add to existing album
    • select which album tag should be added to these images
    • or create a new album tag with which the selected images will be added to the album
  • or create a new album and specify which album tag should be used
    • either use one which all selected images have
    • or invent a new one which all selected images will receive as a new tag
• Allow uploading images that can then be added to an album if one desires to do so

I think the filter view is superb and could be also used when uploading images. Additionally the album selector on the side would ease the selection/creation of albums.

Side note: Would also be cool if somebody posts pictures and adds tags to it that fit to an album that those images will be automatically added to the respective album(s).

My proposal is to implement all of the points you make.

Just to be absolutely clear: an 'album' is a tag filter. In my example, I created a filter with three tags, #holiday #france #2016, and named that filter set 'France 2016'. (I suggested being able to name an 'album' when saving the current filter set.) In this example, all photos which have all three of those tags will appear in this 'album'. This includes any photos which also have additional tags, e.g. #beach, #friends, etc. Any photos which have the three tags in this filter added to them in future will automatically be added to my album 'France 2016'. There is no need to create an additional single tag such as #TripToCannes in your example. You example of #butterfly #india is exactly how I imagine this working.

Would also be cool if somebody posts pictures and adds tags to it that fit to an album that those images will be automatically added to the respective album(s).

Yes, this is exactly how I propose this to work. Although, just to be clear, it will only be the case that photos I upload and tag with #holiday #france #2016 would be added to my album 'France 2016', not when anyone else uploads photos with those tags. I'm not proposing this to be a 'public' collection of photos in the sense that photos uploaded and tagged by any user in Diaspora are added to it. It is a personal collection of my photos, although I might make those photos publicly visible.

I hope that makes my proposal clear now.

Absolutely agree with all points. Apart from the first use case I mentioned, that you don't seem to quite get:
If I want an album where "random" pictures are in (not easily filtered/sorted by tags per se) then I'd need to add a tag to all those images to be able to put them into an album.

And album tags are exlusive, right? So an image has to meet all tags required by an album to be listed in it instead of just one.?

This proposal seems excellent. The following features would be also practical:
* Renaming tags,
* A way to structure tags, in case you have many. E.g. if you have a bunch of year tags (#1999, #2000, ..., #2016) and a bunch of animal tags (#buffalo, #ostrich, #human) and so on, then you may want to group these somehow, perhaps in a folder hierarchy.
* Maybe a way to have tags containing spaces and punctuation, although the world seems to have embraced the #clumsinessofspacelessandillegibletags.
* Logical operators and, or, not for filtering.

Also, I'm not sure if being able to save filters is worthwhile, but I'm not opposed to it.

Tomises: adding tags to existing photos is already part of the proposal.

I like the idea of organizing through #tags!
I agree that D* should not be thought of as a storage cloud, more so for new users! that come in with facebook " """free"""" unlimited storage service" habits... I think it could be better if you could add caption tags to any photo and photos with the same tags get organized in 'virtual' folders that are basically tag holders.

And maybe some easy integration with mediagoblin services and other open source services could help discourage using D* as cloud storage and more as an integration-community-communication tool :D

I feel would be a great idea to add geo coordinates and a small map, which is already shown for status messages. Coordinates can retrieved from the Exif data of the pictures. This should be an optional feature. What do you think about this PR? https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/pull/7272

"What do you think about my rejected PR" is not a valid proposal. Not at all, in fact. Proposals are about implementing an idea or not. In any way, having a vote on this is pointless since a) there was no controversy b) we have not discussed about how we want to implement it. Voting on a subject that needs discussion is not constructive at all.

However, your pull request had nothing to do with this discussion at all. You implemented a simple map on top of the photos while this is discussion is about making the photo functionalities more rich. The PR got remarks regarding the presentation of the map data and implementation details, which you did neither address nor claim you're going to address within almost two months of posting the remarks, which makes it pretty clear to us that you do not have interest in finishing the work, which is the only reason it was closed.

If you want to discuss on the possible UX for a map within the photos, then do it in a new thread. This is about albums or tags for photos to group them.

Maybe, Dennis, you try not to be too rude the newbies. Spixi did just like he/she was told to (except the opening of a voting).

But you're right: this thread is about albums and not single-photos view. I am not sure if these two views are really two different things in this case. What we could need is a greater new concept for the whole photo-area. Unfortunately we don't have this yet and noone knows if we will ever have one in the future.

For the meantime it could be helpful to find a compromise about this PR by Spixi. Maybe add just the location-icon to the view. And clicking it opens a dialog to show a larger and zoomable leaflet-map of the location.

I am totally happy about having a discussion on whether and how we could/should work on the photo section. There are some great remarks in both the PR and other discussions here, which surely can be worked on. However, as always with those ideas, someone actually would have to commit on working on implementing all the fancy stuff we have collected here...

you try not to be too rude the newbies. Spixi did just like he/she was told to

Except for the "annoying people on IRC and voice communication channels" parts, yeah, pretty much. And dropping another PR after discussions started. Sure thing!

@denschub I don't know what you mean with "dropping another PR after discussions started". Indeed I had another PR, but this was a fix to a script when you don't have a global Bundler installation on your system. Further, I advise you to not mix-up the discussions happened on other channels with my work on the diaspora* project. Even when you dislike me, this is definitively not fair and I am sure, you are a clever guy and able to keep these different worlds apart.

I feel geo-coordinates are definitively a way to organise photos, e. g. it could be possible that you create virtual albums later with queries like "all photos taken in 2016 with the hashtag #cat shot in North-Rhine-Westphalia, Germany". The map view was just an example use case without guarantee to be complete, as the pepper brush in GIMP is only an example use case for a pixmap brush. Without this view, my commit would make no sense at all.

But this is only a first step and as usual in iterative projects I am requesting for feedback, and when the majority of devs/users disagree with my proposal, then it is absolutely fine for me.

Once again, this is not about your pull request. There were reasons it got rejected and neither is this the right place to discuss that nor are we going to discuss that. We never merge "just an example use case" for the sake of merging it and this has been explained to you multiple times. It does not matter if people agree or disagree with your proposal since it is invalid. I am not going to quote myself, so you have to scroll up a bit for a long explanation about why the proposal is invalid.

So, I'm the one who redirected @spixi here, as my conclusion in the PR was "this feature has to be included in a more global thinking about photos inside diaspora*".
Spixi is new here and was not aware of the rule "discuss without creating a vote" and that can be understood. Moreover, he was really quick to fix all remarks we did, the only one left I noticed is the federation part (not a small one I agree). I feel like the PR would not have been tagged orphan nor closed that quickly if it was on something which would have interest the core team. Sure, this feature will not be used by many people, but if it helps only a few, why not integrate it if the work is done? So in my opinion, what we needed was to discuss and find a good UI and Spixi looked ready to implement it. It's to have that discussion, on a more global level, that I redirected him here. My bad if that hasn't been understood.

That being said, I'm opening another discussion to see we can do about that as it looks like this is not the place to discuss about it.

Here is the link to the new discussion. Let's not spam this thread anymore.

why not integrate it if the work is done?

• https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/pull/7272#issuecomment-272646786
• https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/pull/7272#issuecomment-274309189
• Basically all comments in https://www.loomio.org/d/QdrGgw7u/new-header-design and https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/pull/5480

...

I am honestly somewhat displeased by the fact I have to make the same statement over and over again, especially against a highly valued contributor like you, @flaburgan. Merging something merely because "someone has worked on it" is one of the worst reasons to merge something. In my very first non-reviewy comment in this PR, I clearly stated "some discussion is needed, and maybe even some mockups before implementing stuff". That post got thumbs-up by @steffenvanbergerem and @supertux88, so we pretty much have an agreement by the entire active core team on that.

We've made that clear before and I am happy to do it again: Pull Requests with impact to the user interface need to be polished before getting merged or there needs to be a clear follow-up plan for polishing work ready before the PR is merged. Neither of those points were fulfilled. That's a no-no for a merge.