Re: [GMG-Devel] Reimagining "favorites" as "collections"

[Jef van Schendel]

I should have responded much earlier, sorry. But sounds good!

I think it's good if users will start off with at least one collection 
by default, it will give them an idea of what they can expect. My only gripe with having favorites as a predefined collection was that I would like favorites to act a little differently, UI-wise, but on second thought there is no reason why that can't still be done.

About tags and collections: I think that right now, they accomplish almost the exact same thing, but they work quite differently, which can be a source of confusion. I believe that sprucing up the collections will provide enough benefits to make both features worthwhile though.

Currently, tags are global (as opposed to per-user) and "quick and dirty" (partially because of how they are used, but also because their names cannot contain spaces).

Collections, on the other hand, belong to a single user (though they can contain media by other users) and are a little bit more "official". I think the latter is very interesting: collections could allow for improved presentation. For instance: having longer names than tags, containing descriptions, allow users to order images to their liking, etc (I believe all of these things have either been mentioned or implemented already, I'm just listing them).


Ticket #522 calls for a "filesystem-like hierarchy": http://issues.mediagoblin.org/ticket/522

So, basically "create folders". Personally I think folders are unnecessarily limiting. I asked Elessar to list desired uses, so let's throw those against our current feature set to see how far we can get.

If we look at "browsing photographs of an event", we have several possibilities:

- One person took photographs and wants to share them. This is possible with a collection.

- Multiple people took photographs and they want to add these all to a public pool. This is possible with a tag, like "lgm2012".

- A small number of people took photographs and would like to add these (but only these) to a pool. This is the only one that isn't possible yet, but I would imagine it is also more rare than the other cases. Do we want to have collections shared by multiple users? Is there another way to make this work?


Anyway, apologies for rambling. In short:
- +1 on making favorites a default collection. 
- Let's make collections really cool, presentation-wise.
- Let's not have folders, but instead make sure we can provide the same functionality.

Jef