Collections vs. Events

[LucLL]

Hi All,

Im still new to PS but starting to find the xmp capabilities amazing, and im also starting to find - and correct - many inconsistencies from the past.
I have two questions to which there might not be the one right answer, but im interested to learn how others do this.

While I have the images labeled to People, Events etc I have Portfolios/Collections of the images similar to how one would have the old foto albums, which I understand is the purpose of the Collections. But I could not find a way like in Labels to automatically map a portfolio to a xmp field as you can do with any of the categories/labels. So I have for practical use a few questions. Any suggestion or advise would be appreciated

1) Just like we keep the labels stored in the xmp fields, wouldn't it be handy to also have the portfolio/collection in the xmp field (ig Headline)? How do you accomplish that as you can't map the portfolio/collection to a xmp field. Manually each time? By having an Event with the same name mapped, or by script?

2) How do you categorise labels and/or to what detail. If I have a Birthday I can have an Event label "Birthday" and in the People labels I have potentially all the people which appear on the pictures. But..... How do you identify "Birthday" of person "x" ? You can't just search for both items as person X would probably appear on many other pictures and birthdays then just his own? Would you create Events::Birthday:X ? Although you then have a X defined twice (once in People and Once in Events::Birthday) Or a full Label "Birthday X", .... or any other way? (Birthday is just a simple exam,e here, it may just as well apply to other Events etc and even at the same time)
Suggestions welcome. Thanks

It might be a basic questions, but I feel there are many ways, wondering what your experiences are ....

Thanks in advance.

Luc

[HCS]

Hi All,

Im still new to PS but starting to find the xmp capabilities amazing, and im also starting to find - and correct - many inconsistencies from the past.
I have two questions to which there might not be the one right answer, but im interested to learn how others do this.

While I have the images labeled to People, Events etc I have Portfolios/Collections of the images similar to how one would have the old foto albums, which I understand is the purpose of the Collections. But I could not find a way like in Labels to automatically map a portfolio to a xmp field as you can do with any of the categories/labels. So I have for practical use a few questions. Any suggestion or advise would be appreciated

1) Just like we keep the labels stored in the xmp fields, wouldn't it be handy to also have the portfolio/collection in the xmp field (ig Headline)? How do you accomplish that as you can't map the portfolio/collection to a xmp field. Manually each time? By having an Event with the same name mapped, or by script?

2) How do you categorise labels and/or to what detail. If I have a Birthday I can have an Event label "Birthday" and in the People labels I have potentially all the people which appear on the pictures. But..... How do you identify "Birthday" of person "x" ? You can't just search for both items as person X would probably appear on many other pictures and birthdays then just his own? Would you create Events::Birthday:X ? Although you then have a X defined twice (once in People and Once in Events::Birthday) Or a full Label "Birthday X", .... or any other way? (Birthday is just a simple exam,e here, it may just as well apply to other Events etc and even at the same time)
Suggestions welcome. Thanks

It might be a basic questions, but I feel there are many ways, wondering what your experiences are ....

Thanks in advance.

Luc

Luc, i don't have any reply on your first question. I don't do that and likewise wouldn't know how to.

As to your second question, i take the route of defining the person's birthday in the Event:Birthday tree and then also categorize the people appearing in the pictures in the People tree. You say that the birthday boy/girl then appears twice. Well ... sometimes yes, but of course the whole event is that person's birthday, even if not appearing in the pictures themselves. Likewise, i'd like to find all pictures of that person when searching via the People axis, not only that person's birthday pictures. If i want to find only that person's birthday pictures, then there is the Event:Birthday entry.

Hope this helps.

[Mike Buckley]

wouldn't it be handy to also have the portfolio/collection in the xmp field (ig Headline)?

I don't do complex searches, so maybe that explains why I don't understand why that would be helpful. The Portfolio area has its own dedicated search function. You can access it three ways: shortcut Ctrl+F, right click any Portfolio or Collection and select Find (the search box that appears searches all Portfolios and Collections, not just the selected Portfolio or Collection), click the open area of the panel and begin typing the words to be searched.

[LucLL]

HCS,
Thanks for the feedback. May I have one additional question to that, if you have the name twice (once in people and once in birthday) isn't it then difficult or confusing if using the assign pannel to assign it to the correct label, whichever one you want it to be, as there would potentially twice a button with X listed?

Or is there any other caveat that would make it problematic to have labels twice? What you suggested is what I was planning to do but I'm wondering if I could be consistent in this in everything. Eg, what if for holidays you go to Paris, but another time you are for another reason in Paris, not holidays would PS not automatically assign with geo tagging the first label which might not be the right one in this case? As there would be a label Location::France::Paris as well as Event::Holiday::Paris? Or would you add years into this structure as well, or any other means to keep them different?
I'm playing devils advocate here just trying to challenge Before going down that route.

Mike,
Thanks as well for the feedback. I understand I could search in the portfolios, but the point would be that via labels I can keep all info in the xmp fields which doesn't seem to be possible via portfolios. And with only birthday as a generic label and a people tag, I can't distinguish by the information in the file if this picture was at his birthday or if he was a visitor to another ones birthday. Therefore I was considering to add an additional level after birthday to identify whose birthday, but was wondering how others do this or if there is any caveat in doing this.... Or if I'm just thinking the wrong way over all.

Thanks!

[Hert]

I'll also play the Devil's advocate here: is Paris a Holiday? Holiday::Paris is not a great name to describe a holiday. If you assign the label Holiday and place Paris you'll have the exact same. If you want to describe a holiday to Paris then give it a name that makes sense; eg "Family trip to Paris"

[HCS]

HCS,
Thanks for the feedback. May I have one additional question to that, if you have the name twice (once in people and once in birthday) isn't it then difficult or confusing if using the assign pannel to assign it to the correct label, whichever one you want it to be, as there would potentially twice a button with X listed? ...

Well, i don't do all keywording via the assign panel. I do do this for most appearing people (i.e. my own family) and do the rest via drag 'n' drop to the left side panel (don't know what it's called).

[HCS]

I'll also play the Devil's advocate here: is Paris a Holiday? Holiday::Paris is not a great name to describe a holiday. If you assign the label Holiday and place Paris you'll have the exact same. If you want to describe a holiday to Paris then give it a name that makes sense; eg "Family trip to Paris"

Hert,

I don't necessarily agree. While i don't apply the method described above (the one with people and birthday) to my holidays, it's very well possible that one would name their holiday after the most dominant destination. So, in the example, the Paris holiday was destined for Paris, but while there also surrounding areas or villages/cities were visited and keyworded in the Places tree.

Whether or not this would work for everyone, i doubt it, but i think it isn't necessarily "wrong".

[LucLL]

Hert, HCS,

I believe I can agree with both of you. While indeed Paris or France could just be seen as a generic name of a generic holiday name and not relevant as a place name, of course holidays could be called more descriptive at least like Summer Trip to Paris, or Ski trip to Austria. Just for the sake of avoiding double labels in the catalog. But with Birthdays i would be struggling to be creative on calling them anything else then Birthday::John Smith, unless you want to go to a label like Birthday:: The amazing John Smith ... just for the sake of making it unique.

What im actually after is to find a way to be sure that if one would ever require to do so, I could recreate the entire tree structure (including albums like portfolios/collections) based on information out of the files xmp data. So if I have a portfolio like eg. 2015::John Smiths Birthday... I would potentially have also labels like Event::Birthday and Names::John Smith.
But this by it selves does not allow me to know just by the labels: a) the album itself (portfolio/collection) and/or b) if John was at someone else birthday or if it was his own birthday.
So again, suggestions welcome.
Currently I understand that with Birthdays I could add the name as a next level, even if this would be a duplicate (or?), and for Holidays I could just keep it limited to kind of holidays (Ski, Summer, Weekend/Short, ....) if required, as the location and date would do the rest. Eg. Places::France and Event::Holiday::Summer would give me all the pictures of our summer holiday to France . So in this case I don't need "Paris" as sub category of Holiday.

Thanks for the tips and the constructive challenge. Always like further suggestions! Thanks again.

Luc

[vlad]

That's an interesting discussion and it points to a more general problem (which extends far beyond Photo Supreme, to such fascinating areas as concept classification, semantic systems, natural language processing): which semantic relationships are described in a hierarchical structure of terms or concepts?

I think that Hert's more general advice is to define hierarchical labels using terms that explicitly describe ISA specializations ("ïs a [specific, kind of]"):

Holiday is a kind of Event
Holiday in France is a kind of Holiday
Family Holiday in France is a kind of Holiday in France

I mostly agree with Hert and would also note that France is not a specific Holiday or a kind of Holiday, so defining a Event::Holiday::France label will probably lead (sooner or later) to the kind of problems noted by Luc. Following this reasoning, I would say that the event corresponding to John Smith's birthday is naturally - and unambiguously - represented by the following hierarchy: Event::Birthday:: John Smith's Birthday. (Please note that this is completely different than: Event::Birthday::John Smith, since John Smith is not a specific birthday, while John Smith's Birthday is.)

At the same time, I would note the following caveats:

1) It's not straightforward to think of all hierarchical relationships in terms of crude ISA specializations. Let's take, for example, the very intuitive hierarchy: Places::Europe::France::Paris. It could be argued that Europe is indeed a kind of place, but France is not a kind of Europe and Paris is not a kind of France (oh, well); yet, that could be reconciled like this: France is a specific place in Europe and Paris is a specific place in France. Similarly, I would say that People::John Smith's Family::Mary Smith is a good hierarchy because Mary Smith denotes a specific member of John Smith's Family. (Please note that this still doesn't work for Event::Birthday::John Smith - no matter how you cut it, 'John Smith' is not a birthday, does not belong to the class of birthday events etc.)

2) Semantic specificity not only requires additional rigor in defining the term hierarchy but it also comes with the price of (lexical) redundancy. For example, it does appear superfluous to define Event::Birthday::John Smith's Birthday when you already have Event::Birthday and People::John Smith - but there is no way to avoid it once you realize that 'John Smith's Birthday' event can't be reduced (in general) to the query: (Event::Birthday AND People::John Smith).

3) Keep in mind that Photo Supreme does allow non-hierarchical label relationships. If you want to explicitly represent in the catalog that 'John Smith' and 'John Smith's Birthday' are related (although non-hierarchical) terms and labels, you could define a relationship between the two. (That may be overkill in practice - I'm only pointing out that option.)

Luc, it appears you care a lot about your image metadata, so I'll point out two additional things:

4) The spec does not define iptc4xmp:Event as a bag type, so you can't store multiple events (as such) in your metadata. If you define the Event::Birthday::John Smith hierarchy, you will get in your event metadata either 'John Smith' (which doesn't make sense as an event) OR 'Birthday' (which provides only partial info). (If you assign both labels, I don't even think PSU provides any guarantee about which of the two values it would write.) Event::Birthday::John Smith's Birthday naturally solves this issue.

5) If you define and assign both People::John Smith and Event::Birthday::John Smith, you will end up with duplicate flat keywords ('John Smith, John Smith'). Again, Event::Birthday::John Smith's Birthday naturally solves this issue. (If you assign both, you will end up with 'John Smith, John Smith's Birthday' within your keywords - but I would argue this is not technically redundant, as the two distinct strings denote two different image subjects: a person and an event. And you could always turn off the writing of John Smith's Birthday as a keyword, if it's enough for you to store that string inside iptc4xmp:Event.)


Hope that helps - and sorry if I made my post too complex or theoretical. (I could often use 100 lines to write the same thing that Hert writes in 2 lines )

[vlad]

Regarding portfolio and collections:

What im actually after is to find a way to be sure that if one would ever require to do so, I could recreate the entire tree structure (including albums like portfolios/collections) based on information out of the files xmp data.

If you are talking about recreating the hierarchical structure inside Photo Supreme itself, then there is indeed a way to accomplish that (including both labels and portfolios), using IdImager's Custom Schema (ICS). You should make sure the ICS Writing global option is enabled, as recommended. (Should the need to reconstruct the catalog actually arise, you will also need to enable the ICS Reading - but don't do that otherwise.)

If you are talking about recreating the hierarchies in some other DAM application or platform, I don't think there's any dedicated metadata field specified for portfolios and collections in the standards, so the problem seems moot to me. (Furthermore, I would note that portfolios and collections are containers of images - not properties of images)

So if I have a portfolio like eg. 2015::John Smiths Birthday... I would potentially have also labels like Event::Birthday and Names::John Smith.
But this by it selves does not allow me to know just by the labels: a) the album itself (portfolio/collection) and/or b) if John was at someone else birthday or if it was his own birthday.

a) An album is not a standard property of an image. For PSU portfolios and collections, you have the ICS writing/reading mechanism. Outside PSU, you could (re)create albums/portfolios/collections based on the hierarchical keywords (lr:hierarchicalKeywords) + your own set of conventions.

b) See my previous post.

Regards,
Vlad

[Mike Buckley]

I would potentially have also labels like Event::Birthday and Names::John Smith. But this by it selves does not allow me to know just by the labels..if John was at someone else birthday or if it was his own birthday.

You could use the heirarchy Event::Birthday::Tim's 30th Birthday.

[LucLL]

Mike, Vlad,
Thanks for the comments! Appreciated!

Vlad,
Soon I'll have to buy you a barrel instead of just a beer
I appreciate VERY much your very descriptive and detailed explanation and in good English . Its very much appreciated!

Your clarification and playing around with it for some more time gets me much better on the road... Thanks again. One day I'll have to write down my experience of going from Aperture to PS. And my PS experience as such, Its a lot to learn from PS, but so far its been worth every penny already.
Im really excited about PS at the moment. I have hope to FINALLY once (somewhere down the road) I may actually get my library organised although it has 100+ K images. PS gives me the feeling tis possible. With several previous products I was always in doubt... well not even doubt, I knew it wasn't working as it should.
Anyway... thanks again for your great explanation and Im delighted that I see light at the end of the tunnel... and it may not be a train coming my way

Cheers,
Luc

[Paul C]

Maybe this is too simplistic, but in this Birthday situation, couldn't you solve the problem by using a combination of the Description with the Catalog labels? For example, if the Description for all the images from John Smith's birthday party said "John S Birthday", and you had a catalog People label for John Smith, I believe that a search with the Description "John S Birthday" and the People label for John Smith (combined using the "And") would give you only images of John Smith at his birthday party. Since the Description can be anything you want whether related to keywords or category labels or not, and you can apply the Description at import in a profile to all images in an import session, it seems to me at the Description potentially provides a powerful addition to the search capabilities for a situation such as the one you describe without requiring you to create catalog labels you might not want for any other purpose. This approach might also be useful for a Paris Vacation so you don't have to decide whether Paris is a type of vacation or a place.

[vlad]

Luc, I'm glad you found my post helpful and appreciated the details instead of criticizing the ramblings (And yes, I do know the feeling of being excited about PS - there are indeed very good reasons.)

I find Paul's suggestion worthy. The search bar indeed allows textual searches everywhere, including in image descriptions. You could even restrict such searches to descriptions only. (What the SB doesn't easily allow are complex queries across multiple domains - a combination of labels + description text, for example - but one could use dynamic searches or filtering for such needs.) OTOH, you could also create a portfolio collection for John S Birthday, without any corresponding label. (Import profiles are really powerful - in addition to profiles, they also provide for the placement of imported images into portfolio collections.)

[LucLL]

Hi Vlad and Paul,

I would agree to an extend and im still wondering what to do

I know Im maybe driving this a bit far, but this time i want to know that im making the right choice and that I'm doing the right thing and do it the right way. Or at least have myself convinced that its as close and as good i can currently do it.

Certainly you can search the portfolios and I was already thinking putting the collection name into the headline field of the image, that way I could potentially always read back the collection/album as it would be the header of the image. And potentialy if someone looks at the picture, the header of the image and the potential description should be pretty self-explanatory what they are looking at.

Keyword wise, im still wondering what to do with - let me stay with the Birthday example - the sublevel (if any) of the Birthday label. Im pretty sure I would not use something like Event::Birthday::Johns 40th Birthday as to stay consistent with this I would have a separate event for each and every birthday. With a huge family every year the number of Birthday labels would be a bit silly as I think that the "labels" should still be possible to be used then just at one single event or moment in time. For that singel event or moment in time I would see this more as a function of a collection.

Nevertheless, I still think that I would maybe not stop at the Birthday level but use Event::Birthday::John Smith's Birthday.
Why? (Feel free to share your suggestion/comments/advice/...)
I can identify an individual birthday of John by the collection and that would be easy, because if i know that I want to get the pictures of his birthday party last year I probably know its in the portfolio 2014 and can go to eg the collection 2014::Johns 40th Birthday party. And he probably does not have that many in a single year

If I want to get all of his birthday party pictures, (or all ski holidays or something like that) I could go to Events::Birthday::John's Birthday and I would get all pictures from each and every of his birthdays, which would be a bit more difficult doing this with collections as I would have to select the pictures of each of his birthday party's in each of the different year portfolios. So for the Birthdays I believe im there.

As I may have the answer to the birthday part, and maybe to the Holiday part too (Event::Holiday::Family Summer Holiday // Family Skiing Holiday // ... )
It of course still leaves for each event a bit of a question to what level to go, and I believe that might be differently answered by each of us depending probably if,where and how you actually want to use the catalog.
Accordingly one could question, should I distinguish Summer Holiday from a Hiking Trip or is the Hiking Trip also just a summer holiday, assuming of course that you do the hiking trip in summer. Therefore if you would be doing the hiking in summer and winter, it might actually be more useful to have a classification of Event::Holiday::Hiking::Summer Hiking Trip// Winter Hiking Trip, instead the other way around, being Event::Holiday::Summer:: Summer Holiday // Hiking Trip.
In this later case I would probably go for Event::Holiday::Family Summer Holiday // Family Skiing Holiday // Hiking trip with Louisa // Family Bike Holiday
SO I would not have a Family Biking Holiday in France and Family Biking Holiday in Czech Republic as two different Events. The collections and potentially the location field can help me sufficient to distinguish that and at the ent the event is a Biking Trip, so selecting the event would give me all pictures of all biking trips we ever did, while for an individual trip I have the collection (which would be stored in the headline of the image too) and/or the location and date to filter it out.

If you made it till here... thanks for following and thank you very much for the enlightening conversation and discussion on this subject. I may not have all the answers for all Events, but probably have a strong basis now how to start to define them. So lets see where we get from here.... thanks again

Oh... one more thing.... what about Event::BBQ and what if the BBQ was actually on someones Birthday ???? multiple Events

... question will be whats the main event I think ... Are we doing the BBQ because its his birthday or are we having a birthday because we do a BBQ.... Hmmm interesting

Cheers!
Luc