Tagging by multiple users?

bradtem

I've hunted around a lot of the photo systems, both those like Copermine and Gallery and also flickr/picasa/smugmug/etc. and Zenphoto seems the nicest for my goal, which is a collaborative photo album containing the photo archives of a large 50 year old club. By collaborative, it is essential that the various members be able to come in and tag, describe and comment on photos that they did not upload, as well as upload some for others. Trusted members should also be able to rotate, crop and rearrange photos in albums.

I've been surprised at how hard it has been to find something that will do this and do it well. Zenphoto looks nice but I find the tagging interface a bit confusing. There seems to be just one text box for tagging, and once it has been filled in, it is not obvious at all that it's the tags or that one can click on it to edit it. Further, when you click on it, you just have the one box, and it's easy to erase the prior tags if you don't know what you are doing, when 99.9% of people should just be adding tags. (This is flickr style.) In addition, if you click on the description, it fills in a default text of "no description" that you then have to erase by hand -- I presume that's just a bug as it doesn't do this in the tag box.

So any method to get tags as a list that people can add to (and only admins can remove from?)

I will admit zenphoto also lacks one very sexy new feature showing up in other systems, namely face tagging and face recognition. In face tagging you either draw a box and tag it, or click on a face (facebook style) and tag it. With face recognition, the boxes are pre-drawn and you just label them, and it helps you quickly tag all the similar faces. Very slick but none of the systems are collaborative -- only the owner can do this in Picasa. The face recognition in Picasa is so useful (we're doing many thousands of photos with thousands more faces) that I have been tempted to use it and just share the password, as kludgey as that would be.

But I'm hoping zenphoto can meet my needs.

sbillard

I presume you are refernencing the front-end editing facilities.

Taging is properly done via the admin interface. Likewise is adding descriptions, etc. Have you actually looked at the back-end admin interface?

Anyway, what you see is what you get. If it does not meet your needs, don't use it.

acrylian

Face tagging could probably be done as a plugin although I have no idea how that works (or ever used or needed) nor do I/we plan to add that feature. But since we are open source you are invited to provide a plugin for that if you really need it.

bradtem

I'm not trying to ask zenphoto to be something other than it wants to be, of course. It does seem to support the idea that people can add a one-line thing called "tags" to the photo, and it appears that you can enable other users to add those tags, which is good. But is that an unintended feature? What I was hoping to point out was that as it sits now, once a tag field is filled in, it's not at all clear to the other users coming in that they need to click on it and edit it, being careful not to remove what's there. My fear is that as it sits now, people would often make a mistake and just replace the existing tag line, and this would sit in the way of using zenphoto for a group to collaboratively tag and label its photo collection.

If that is not something zenphoto is intended for, then don't worry about it.

acrylian

Well, while we have multiuser support most people use Zenphoto for personal gallery sites. So it is not our focus.

But what does speak against giving your users some instructions before you let them use the site? That inline editing is adapted code (if I recall right, it has been there before I got to zp) and I don't think it is possible to tell it to kepp what is there as there is technically no real difference if someone actually wants to change all tags or just made a mistake deleting them.

Maybe the best solution would be it either let them do that on the backend or write a plugin that maybe uses checkboxes as the backend on the frontend.