Places hierarchy and labels generated from geotags

[snowman1]

In the past I have only sporadically done reverse lookups to populate place names for images. I intend to go back and do this more rigourously now. However I have discovered something odd is happening - the generated labels are ending up under "Events" instead of "Places". So I am ending up with labels such as Events::Italy::Trentino-Alto Adige::Campitello di Fassa.

I have tested by creating a new test catalog and it works fine on that, the labels are created under "Places" as I would expect.

My main catalog was created a long time ago, it was migrated from IDI, and back in the mists of time I did once use my own label hierarchies before deciding the default ones were best - I wonder if this history has somehow led to this odd behaviour.

No doubt I will end up raising a Mantis ticket but maybe the good folk here can help me first - I have two questions:

1. Why is this happening - and is it possible to correct it so new labels of this type are generated under Places not Events?

2. I notice that when a new catalogue is created, by default it contains catalog labels under Places with country names along with some rather nice flag symbols - is it possible to create or backport these into an existing catalog?

[fbungarz]

Very strange. I migrated from IDI too and my labels are correctly located under Places. Could it be that you perhaps in the past renamed one of these two default categories (places and/or events), perhaps even by accident? In that case perhaps your database uses some internal reference and places these labels erroneously. Just guessing ...

[tstoddard]

2. I notice that when a new catalogue is created, by default it contains catalog labels under Places with country names along with some rather nice flag symbols - is it possible to create or backport these into an existing catalog?

This old topic might help with the symbols:

http://forum.idimager.com/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=22811

[snowman1]

@Tom - many thanks, that has worked.
@Frank - yes that was my suspicion as well. It was all a very long time ago and I can't recall the exact details of what I did and didn't do back then. But I have been experimenting and the results were consistent with this hypothesis. No matter what I did, labels were always created/assigned under the places hierarchy. If I merged or moved a place label to another category, the next assignment caused the label to be re-created under "places". If I renamed "places" to "something else" and then renamed "events" to "places"; the label was created under "something else". This is all consistent with the internal mechanism being hard coded to point to the "places" category by an internal identifier. The use of internal ids is sound practice, the hard coding less so and it would be nice to be able to select a new category as the target, which would get round the situation I have. But then if I really did manage to swap events with places (10 years ago when I didn't have GPS and IDI didn't have geotagging) that's probably not a scenario that was ever envisaged. It looks like I will have to do a fair bit of copying and renaming to get back to "normal" on this.

[bimo]

Frank and Snowman,

as far as I can see you are absolutely on the right track. Back in IDI there were two labels which were very special: "You can not remove the categories People and Keywords. That is because IDimager uses these categories internally to store face labeling results or create catalog labels during import. You can, however, rename these categories." (cited from the IDI documentation)

Today, in PSU these very special labels are people, places, miscellaneous and events which are automatically propagated from the catalog to the file's metadata details (and vice versa); that's why you can't delete but rename these labels. And so I very much agree to your finding that Snowman must have accidentally renamed the places label to event.

Now at least these questions arise:

• when migrating from IDI to PSU how were the new special labels event, miscellaneous and places recognized? Indeed in my migrated catalog only people, places and miscellaneous are special (=can't be deleted) while the event label is very regular and can be deleted like any other label I had added to the catalog.
• those who have migrated from IDI: do you have the four special labels in PSU?
• what is the effect of not having the special label event when a file is imported into the catalog which on import already has the event "eventname" in its metadata? Does that result in a label "eventname()" (because no superior category can be found)?
• shouldn't PSU check if all of the special labels exist and create the missing ones?
• can a special label be recreated manually? How?

[snowman1]

Good piece of digging Michael, good info, thanks. It seems a strange thing for me to have done, but then it was probably more than 10 years ago; I was only just starting to use and experiment with idi as it was then; idi didn't have geotagging; and I certainly didn't have a phone with GPS! Incredible how things have changed so much so quickly. So maybe I did do that - I certainly can't think of any other explanation.
Your questions are indeed good ones, though I guess the last one might only apply if someone went in to the database directly rather than via the app as presumably that is the only way one of these could be deleted. I haven't had chance yet to investigate these questions by comparing a test catalogue to my migrated catalogue but I will try to do this tomorrow.

[snowman1]

Update: I have had a dig in my database and this has confirmed that I did indeed, a very long time ago, rename events to places and vv. So, boys and girls, learn from my mistake and don't do this very silly thing! I can only think it was a cunning plan to re-order the categories. Oh well, it looks like I have some re-organising to do!!

[vlad]

The use of internal ids is sound practice, the hard coding less so and it would be nice to be able to select a new category as the target, which would get round the situation I have.

I concur. One way to achieve that, as well as other goodies, would be to open up the category-dependent behavior via some transparent, powerful (but perhaps programmable, rather than user-friendly) label templates, as I previously suggested: http://mantis.idimager.com/view.php?id=2844

As long as the hard-coding pertaining to Places, Pople and Events is maintained, it would perhaps make sense to disable the renaming of those particular categories. (Of course, that won't help people who already renamed them.)

[fbungarz]

(Of course, that won't help people who already renamed them.)

Actually for these people it would even be worse, because they could then not rename them back.

[vlad]

(Of course, that won't help people who already renamed them.)

Actually for these people it would even be worse, because they could then not rename them back.

Good point, but the renaming could be turned off only if the original name is actually used.

(Just my thought:
Programming = The art of handling exceptions )

[snowman1]

To be fair you've got to rename them as badly as I did for it to really matter