SUMMARY Allow us to create groups of photos without moving/changing the files on disk. E.g. I may want to have a photo in two albums at the same time, but don't want to duplicate the photo. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20230522 KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.5 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.106.0 Qt Version: 5.15.9 Kernel Version: 6.3.2-1-default (64-bit) Graphics Platform: X11 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
I have a significant concern here: overlaying a non-filesystem-based organizational structure on top of the underlying filesystem-based organizational structure contributes to vendor lock-in. If you ever want to use a different app, you lose your photo organization, because outside of the filesystem, there's no cross-app/desktop standard for photo organization the way there is with music files for example, where correctly-tagged music can be displayed in any sane music library app. This is quite an unpleasant thing to realize after you switch photo apps--or even worse, switch whole platforms--and the careful organization you did in the old app is completely lost in the new one. So I think if we did implement this, we'd want the underlying data structure to remain portable such that other apps can make use of it in a sane way. So it might be best if this was implemented in such a way that changes made for this are actually reflected in the filesystem. e.g. a photo appearing in multiple places could be symlinked or hardlinked from its original location to the other one, and creating a new album just created a new folder on disk.