Large-scale subalbum management
Christopher Smith <bugzilla <at> christophersmith.net>
2006-07-15 23:20:38 GMT
I received a digital camera for Christmas last year and have found
myself taking lots and lots of pictures. Accordingly, I've been
looking for a package that will let me keep thumbnails (preferably
something like Booh's Web Album) on my hard disk while recording most
of the pictures to DVD or some such to free up disk space.
I've been playing with Booh and like it pretty well so far, but there
are a few shortcomings that make it difficult to use for keeping photos
like I want to. In particular, I would like to be able to keep a
master album of all of my pictures and then just export particular
subalbums for burning to a DVD. (For this, it would be helpful to have
a "protect" or "keep" option on subalbums to keep them from being
automatically cleared out when I remove them from the hard disk.)
I've looked at the XML that the albums use, and I've noticed
that "subalbums" are treated differently from "albums"; the
disadvantage is that, unlike regular directories on a filesystem, I
can't just pull out a particular subalbum or set of subalbums (say, all
the subalbums from January to March). Furthermore, when creating a Web
Album, I only see subalbums of wherever I am instead of /(sub)+albums/.
For the 0.9 series, I would suggest modifying the XML so that instead of
having the 'booh' tag for albums and the 'dir' tag for subalbums,
there's just a single common nestable tag, such as 'album'. That way,
the XML structure would be a tree that can be expanded and collapsed
easily. For example, it would be possible to select a single subalbum
(or range of subalbums) and export just the selection as a Web Album.
Additionally, it would be fairly easy to organize a Web Album layout so
that the main page included the links to every 'album' in the whole
collection instead of only the subalbums directly beneath the current
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