autosave user-generated data (title, description) as EXIF tags to the images

EDIT: I changed the title of this thread.

I can't wait till G3 is released. Looks great so far.

Managing 8 years worth of photos (with more to come once I digitize the old paper-based stuff), 44k images, hundreds of albums, 32 GB total, my biggest problem is that the information related to pictures is volatile. A partial solution was to keep them in a rigid folder hierarchy:
- top folder is the year number (2005, 2006...)
- within each year, I create "albums" which are folders containing all pictures related to a given event, folder name is YYYY-DD-MM_event_name(_optionally_place_too)

I guess I could append to each picture's file name the "image title" as it were, therefore preserving that information too, but all this mucking with file and folder names is tiresome, inefficient and limited. It's much better to store all that info within the pictures as EXIF tags.

Here's my proposal:
G3 should store all the information "surrounding" a picture within the picture itself, as a set of EXIF tags. The things that should be stored are:
- album name
- picture name
- summary
- keywords
- description
(I'm thinking in G2 terms, I'm not sure if G3 dropped some of these things after the re-design, e.g. summary, or added anything new. I broke my test G3 and I can't reinstall it right now to see what's the situation.)

Really, what I care about are the first three pieces of information, but the rest would be a nice bonus.
Also, summary and description seem redundant to me. The user gives the picture a name and then makes a brief description underneath. But summary and description? Why? (I'm not sure if this was addressed in G3)

This should be accomplished automatically, transparent to the user. Did you change the picture's name? G3 should just go and update the corresponding EXIF tag for you.

The tags could be something like this (I'm using the exiv2 format):
Exif.Gallery.Album_Name
Exif.Gallery.Photo_Name
Exif.Gallery.Photo_Summary
Exif.Gallery.Photo_Keywords
Exif.Gallery.Photo_Description

One thing I'm not sure how it should be handled is the problem of nested albums. Should the names of all the upper layer containers be put in a single Album_Name tag, with some sort of separator between layers (and figure out character escaping), or create multiple Album_Name_X tags, with X being the layer number, 1 representing topmost albums?
I think the latter solution is better.

I realize all these things are also stored by G3 elsewhere, perhaps in a database, and duplicating info is horribly ugly from the programmer's perspective. But from the user's perspective, it makes total sense. The users don't care about the database, all they care about are the pictures per se. This is a case where usability trumps coding practices.

Anyway, having such a feature, G3 could solve a lot of file management issues with large photo collections.

Is something like this planned to go into the core, or is it something that the community should get involved in?

--
Florin Andrei
http://florin.myip.org/gallery2/

I belive this is somthing that the community should tackle.
Seems to me to be more like a EXIF/IPTC editing tool not a bit of software for displaying photos on your website. A G3 module could be developed to allow the user to input the data in some form, via some boxes or write the data to the image from data that G3 already has.

Some G2 modules write data to the image directly ( map module coordinates ) so it is possible to do. Just a matter of coming up with the correct UI and feature set that is desired.

Dave

_____________________________________________
Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team