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Moved category does not inherit parents

Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2014 7:35 pm
by schultzter
Good afternoon...

I've noticed when I move a category to another location in the tree that the photos tagged with that category do not also get the categories parents assigned.

Suppose I have the following tree:

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Activity
- sports
-- swimming
-- tennis
- hockey 
I realise I put hockey in the wrong place so I move it up under sports. But when I look at the pictures that are tagged hockey they are not also tagged sports. In my settings I have it configured to automatically select parents of categories so I would expect this to be applied here as well.

I'm using XnView MP 0.68 un*x x64.

Thanks,

Re: Moved category does not inherit parents

Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2014 8:59 am
by xnview
yes, currently it's not implemented like that. 'select parents of categories' is only to select the parent when you click on a category...

Re: Moved category does not inherit parents

Posted: Thu Sep 25, 2014 6:01 am
by m.Th.
Hmmm.... Mhmmm... Hummm....

Take care at this. If we have:

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Activity
	Sports
		Hockey
		Tennis
		Swimming
Animals
	Mammals
		Rugby
		Whale
If you drag/right-click move 'Rugby' from 'Mammals' to 'Sports' you want to unassign first 'Animals' and 'Mammals' and after that assign "Activity" and "Sports"

Re: Moved category does not inherit parents

Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2014 5:35 pm
by schultzter
m.Th. wrote:.... If you drag/right-click move 'Rugby' from 'Mammals' to 'Sports' you want to unassign first 'Animals' and 'Mammals' and after that assign "Activity" and "Sports"
Yes, you are right.

I think the category handling stems from the way IPTC/XMP handle hierarchies - i.e.: they don't! It seems the standard way many photo organizers implement this is to define a separator (like |) and add all levels of the hierarchy to the metadata. So you end up with with three distinct categories:

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Mammals
Mammals|Sports
Mammals|Sports|Rugby
Probably if this was implemented purely in XnView data then the hierarchies would be implicit as they come from the database that way. Moving a category to a new location in the hierarchy would be seamless.

Only when it comes it to writing the metadata to the image files would it become an issue.

There's definitely some consideration for managing large photo databases and making changes that need to be applied to 1,000's of photos. For the moment as I re-organize my photos I've stopped writing metadata to the files and am working exclusively in the XnView database. Once it's all done I'll run the job to update all the image files from the database. Then maybe I'll go back to doing both, or maybe not, I don't know yet.

Thanks,

Re: Moved category does not inherit parents

Posted: Sat Oct 04, 2014 3:49 pm
by m.Th.
Yes, of course. The problem is that the hierarchy is 'frozen' only in the sidecars.

And even if theoretically one can write an engine to update the sidecars, the necessary time needed to update all those files on a reorganization makes the engine almost useless in practice.
It seems the standard way many photo organizers implement this is to define a separator (like |) and add all levels of the hierarchy to the metadata.
Yep. You have in XnView's Catalog assigned 'Rugby' and in the exported sidecar you have it in two places:

- in the dc:subject XML tag you will have "Rugby"
- in the dc:hierarchicalSubject XML tag you will have "Mammals|Sports|Rugby"