Collaborative tagging idea

darryl

Hi all --

I had an idea just now while doing the dishes.

A few years back I used SmugMug as a photosharing site for my son's preschool. We used the Assistant (Guest) Password which allowed people to upload new photos, but didn't allow for deletions.

This wasn't perfect ("Assistants" could also change category/gallery settings add unwanted Bio thumbnails, etc.), but it worked ok.

The preschool was small, only 88 kids, so I thought if everybody pitched in, we could do a decent job of "tagging" photos with the kids names so that at the end of the year when it was time to do their memory books (a parent "assignment"), you could quickly see all the photos of your kid. Or your kid + his/her best buddy.

As you might expect, we had far more "viewers" than uploaders, but unfortunately there was not an easy way to leverage all of these non-uploaders into taggers.

I actually wrote a hack that would take comments in the form of: tag: noah kevin "emily z" and convert those into keywords, then delete the comments.

But it was an awful hack, and you ended up with inconsistent tags, forgotten quotes, etc.

What I *really* wanted was a Facebook-style pop-up window with auto-suggestions from a static list of approved tags. Ideally after tags were selected, a JSON call could access the SmugMug API and set the keywords appropriately.

Here's an ugly looking mock-up I put together a few years back:



Anyways, I don't know how ugly this would be to code in JavaScript. (I'm a horrible programmer. I can hack stuff together, but this requires real coding.) But at any rate, I'm just putting it out there as an idea.

The other idea I had was doing this completely outside of SmugMug - creating an album "browser" that also had tagging functionality. Doing the coding would be a *lot* easier (because I could hack it all in PHP), but I don't want to have to reinvent a browser. I generally like the SmugMug view options. I'd just like to overlay this keyword tagger on the existing views.

Thoughts?

ebswift

A variation of my Smugfoto app for facebook could be fairly quickly modded for tagging, but I'd need to get it working on external sites first. That's not so challenging in itself, though it does need a .Net Framework 4 enabled server. I started the app off in php, but .Net's my thing. Building a SmugMug 'browser' that's fast ain't that easy. The API is missing a few fundamentals... like 'featured photo' on a gallery - that has to be derived, it's not given. One or two little tiny additions could make SmugMug API web coding a snap.

darryl

Sigh - sometimes I wonder if SmugMug gave out free accounts to students whether there'd be more people interested in hacking together something like this. Or this.

I guess kids are all into the Facebook and the Twitter now. Meh.

(And by kids, I mean college students, because I'm old now.)