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Organising People


Paul Barrett

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I need to pick your brains folks.

 

My current challenge can't be new so instead of giving myself splinters scratching my head i thought I'd see what others have done.

 

As I work through my mountain of negs and prints, scanning an tagging them, my list of People gets longer and longer. On my huge screen it's already 3 screens of scrolling.

 

I need to organise them into logical groups. Because they span several families, 'Family' would seem to be be one obvious logical grouping. The trouble is people belong to multiple family groups according to the maternal ans paternal lines. How do you handle that in Daminion? You can't put one person in different groups can you. I mean you can CREATE the same name in different groups, but it's not the same object.

 

Failing that I could organise names by alphabetic groups. although that's a bit tedious to create and maintain.

 

I'd love to learn what others have done

 

 

BTW Wouldn't it be nice if the tag group header had options for:

 

Group Alphabetically

using first name

using last name

 

 

- Paul

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I need to pick your brains folks.

 

My current challenge can't be new so instead of giving myself splinters scratching my head i thought I'd see what others have done.

 

As I work through my mountain of negs and prints, scanning an tagging them, my list of People gets longer and longer. On my huge screen it's already 3 screens of scrolling.

 

I need to organise them into logical groups. Because they span several families, 'Family' would seem to be be one obvious logical grouping. The trouble is people belong to multiple family groups according to the maternal ans paternal lines. How do you handle that in Daminion? You can't put one person in different groups can you. I mean you can CREATE the same name in different groups, but it's not the same object.

 

Failing that I could organise names by alphabetic groups. although that's a bit tedious to create and maintain.

 

I'd love to learn what others have done

 

 

BTW Wouldn't it be nice if the tag group header had options for:

 

Group Alphabetically

using first name

using last name

 

 

- Paul

 

My people list is long also. I identify them in keyword groups so I can just click the group closed so they don't take up so much space.

 

Acquaintances

Friends - Too many in this list, not sure how to subcategorize it

Immediate Family - including children and grandchildren

Our Parents Family - our parents and siblings

Relatives - everyone else in the family

 

This brings up the way that I have been using keywords almost exclusively of the other tags. It just evolved that way in Lightroom. I structure the keywords up to two or three levels deep and use them for location, people, activity, events, pets, you name it. These files aren't used for commercial purposes so I haven't considered SEO optimization. What are the advantages of using the other tag headers? Do you see any downsides to this approach?

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My people list is long also. I identify them in keyword groups so I can just click the group closed so they don't take up so much space.

 

Acquaintances

Friends - Too many in this list, not sure how to subcategorize it

Immediate Family - including children and grandchildren

Our Parents Family - our parents and siblings

Relatives - everyone else in the family

 

This brings up the way that I have been using keywords almost exclusively of the other tags. I structure the keywords up to two or three levels deep and use them for location, people, activity, events, pets, you name it. It seems to work quite well. Do you see any downsides to this approach?

 

Hi Greg

 

As far as the keyword approach is concerned, that's exactly what I do, because I want to present the library out to my family using Synology Photo Station and it cannot currently handle the specific Daminion tags for People, Places and Events.

But can I just check something? If you're not using Photo Station you are not limited to keywords, because you can create structured levels beneath People, Places and Events. This might be to your advantage if you are using apps that support those tags.

I see what you are doing with the relatives but my requirement is slightly different. Since anyone from any branch of the family can come into the system, their view of what is immediate family, parents and grandparents, and other relatives is well... relative.

So what I was wondering was whether an individual's name tag could be assigned to multiple parent nodes. That way I could have high level keyword groups for each family and assign new people to the appropriate families. Does that make sense?

Regards

- Paul

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Hello Paul,

some time ago I wrote something about the topic to handle the same person having different names.

Here my thoughts:

Daminion Change Name People Tag.pdf

Regards, Uwe

 

Nice paper Uwe

es, people changing their names is a bit of an issue. So far I have taken a very simplistic approach - I someone changes their name I change the keyword. So my married sisters are not know by my last name at all but by their married names. My elder sister divorced and remarried. She is known by her latest married name and any photos from her first marriage carry the latest tag. But since everyone know here by her new name it doesn't seem to cause a problem

This is a completely different approach to e.g. Ancestry.com where a person retains their birth name throughout their life

But you have just alerted me to something. Edits to the tag structure don't get written to the files unless you do a specific 'Write tags to files' command? Holy Moses! Is that true even with Auto-sync turned on?

Regards

 

- Paul

 

 

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Hi Greg

 

As far as the keyword approach is concerned, that's exactly what I do, because I want to present the library out to my family using Synology Photo Station and it cannot currently handle the specific Daminion tags for People, Places and Events.

But can I just check something? If you're not using Photo Station you are not limited to keywords, because you can create structured levels beneath People, Places and Events. This might be to your advantage if you are using apps that support those tags.

I see what you are doing with the relatives but my requirement is slightly different. Since anyone from any branch of the family can come into the system, their view of what is immediate family, parents and grandparents, and other relatives is well... relative.

So what I was wondering was whether an individual's name tag could be assigned to multiple parent nodes. That way I could have high level keyword groups for each family and assign new people to the appropriate families. Does that make sense?

Regards

- Paul

 

In keywords I have used the same name in different branches, some intentional, others not intentional over time. It seems to work. I don't see any problems this has caused.

 

Here is something I'm dealing with on keywords right now. I imported my catalog from the standalone into the sever catalog. It is taking a long time to synchronize. Before finishing the sync I was moving some keywords around. I kept getting the keywords coming back in the violet color in the old form. I assumed this was due to reading back files that had not been yet sychronized. So for now I'm just doing some file folder cleanup until the synch finishes.

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In keywords I have used the same name in different branches, some intentional, others not intentional over time. It seems to work. I don't see any problems this has caused.

I have done the same and it doesn't cause a conflict because they are in separate branches. But you do have to be careful you choose the correct one from the multiple results.

 

But these are actually different objects, not linked in any way. (That's AFAIK, if I am wrong I'll be delighted to be corrected)

What I want to do is to add s single object to several parent nodes in different trees so that the object is shared, one-to-many

 

Here is something I'm dealing with on keywords right now. I imported my catalog from the standalone into the sever catalog. It is taking a long time to synchronize. Before finishing the sync I was moving some keywords around. I kept getting the keywords coming back in the violet color in the old form. I assumed this was due to reading back files that had not been yet sychronized. So for now I'm just doing some file folder cleanup until the synch finishes.

 

Yeah, I guess editing in the same area you are syncing is bound to cause some heartburn. :)

 

- Paul

 

 

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Hi Paul!

 

The challenge is that all the tag types are trees, not networks. I think you cannot achieve what you are trying to do with the current data model. Also the XMP/IPTC standards define the tags as treelike structures.

 

Would it work for you if you selected either paternal or maternal line and selected an appropriate level from history to be the roots of the different family trees? And adding the children into the right tree based on their father/mother.

 

-Juha

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Hi Paul!

 

The challenge is that all the tag types are trees, not networks. I think you cannot achieve what you are trying to do with the current data model.

Elegantly phrased. :)

 

Also the XMP/IPTC standards define the tags as treelike structures.

Yeah. Do the standards allow you to write multiple values to the respective fields? If they did, and network structures were allowed, that could be an answer. I appreciate though that that's a huge architecture change. But surely this issue has been raised before, I can't be the first person to have this issue.

 

Would it work for you if you selected either paternal or maternal line and selected an appropriate level from history to be the roots of the different family trees? And adding the children into the right tree based on their father/mother.

I don't think so, because I have photos going back 5 generations and across a wide range. It doesn't just stop with me. The concept of maternal and paternal lines is completely different for my son compared to me, compared my wife.

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But you have just alerted me to something. Edits to the tag structure don't get written to the files unless you do a specific 'Write tags to files' command? Holy Moses! Is that true even with Auto-sync turned on?

Hello Paul,

just tested once more with a DNG file and build 1582 - also the file is updated if you rename the tag.

BUT if tags have to be merged - then the file is not updated by the tag that results from the merge.

Regards, Uwe

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Hello Paul,

just tested once more with a DNG file and build 1582 - also the file is updated if you rename the tag.

 

Great!

 

BUT if tags have to be merged - then the file is not updated by the tag that results from the merge.

Not so great. I have merged tags loads of times and will continue to do so as the library evolves.

 

Is there a reason for this exception do you know? I can't think of one.

 

- Paul

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Not so great. I have merged tags loads of times and will continue to do so as the library evolves.

Is there a reason for this exception do you know? I can't think of one.

Hello Paul,

Daria reproduced it in their internal system and registered this bug today.

Regards, Uwe

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Hello Paul,

Daria reproduced it in their internal system and registered this bug today.

Regards, Uwe

 

OK, Thanks for your help Uwe

 

@Daria - what is the timeline to fix likely to be please?

 

This is a big issue for me because of the number of times I have merged tags, but also because of the fallout from this.

 

I now have to do a forced write of all tags across all files and reindex the entire library which is time consuming.

 

It creates another issue for me, not Daminion's problem, but because Synology Photo Station has a problem handling the orientation tags that Daminion writes, hundreds of images scattered across the library will be oriented incorrectly, The only way to find them is to go through the library image by image. Damn!

 

- Paul

 

 

 

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