If someone has some spare time...

I am trying to create or thinking of creating a plugin that would help with tag management.

What I would like to do is have a textarea on the album and/or image edit area. A place where you could type in relevant tags, hit save, and presto. instead of adding a tag to the system and then selecting that tag for your album. Make it a one step process instead of a two step.

Looking at things it seems tags are not inserted into the album or image tables. They have their own table and another "obj_to_tag" table that links it all.

Here is some logic I have come up with....

`
$newtag = $POST_DATA
for each $newtag
Query ZP_Tags SELECT from 'name', build array (strip case)
if $newtag == $sql_array
$tag_id = sql array(get 'ID' where 'name')
sql create new record in 'ZP_obj_to_tag'
sql insert(tagid=$tag_id, type=albums, objectid=$ZP_CurrentAlbum)

else

sql create new record in 'ZP_Tags'
sql insert(name=$newtag)
sql query('ZP_tags' select 'id' from where 'name' = $newtag)
$tag_id = sql array
sql create new record in 'ZP_obj_to_tag'
sql insert(tagid=$tag_id, type=albums, objectid=$ZP_CurrentAlbum)
`
Something like that anyway. Basically for each tag in the text area it will search zp_tags to see if it already exists, if it does it will get the tag id and create a link to the album or image in zp_obj_to_tag. If the tag doesn't exist it will create the tag record and then link it. It will do this for each tag entered.

My scripting is very limited and I bet someone could whip this up in 10 minutes where it would take me 2 weeks to get it to work.

Would it not be just as easy to keep two tabs open in your browser--the tags tab and the album/image you are editing?

Even a split screen approach still makes it a 2 step process if the tag doesnt already exist. Even if it does already exist, for galleries that have a lot of images/albums and/or a lot of tags it's a huge pain in the butt to have to search through and find the right tags out of hundreds or even thousands.

If something like this existed the tags could be done very quickly, very effeciently, and very easily.

Even the forum software here lets you add tags "on-the-fly" when creating a post.

This "tag texarea" that im suggesting could even be put on the upload screen too. That way tags could be added during the upload.

[i]could even be put on the upload screen too[/i]
It then would be much more efficient to add the tags via exif/xmp management tools before uploading. Then they would also be attached to the images directly.

Regarding the idea, feel free to start on that plugin, we appreciate every third party stuff. There can't be enough plugins. Although I personally think that the idea has something, I will not give it a shot for now due to lack of time and similar things.

The best approach to adding tags at upload time is to put them in the image metadata.

ok, thus far ....

`

Also....

if $newtag == $row['name']
Will case be an issue here?

if $newtag = this will it match ThIs??? Do I need to strip case on both to avoid duplicate tag entries?

Personally, I like sidecar XMP approach, and I do not use any other tagging method.

Should something go wrong online, all my tags are already there together with images on an offline location.

And I can edit XMP in any text editor (using Notepad++ with XML syntax highlighting).

This is template that I use. It's very simple, tags go in "" and picture description in "":

`

`

Well, isn't it easier to use the metadata in the image itself. Photoshop can do that, Bridge and dozens of other image management systems as well.