Moved category does not inherit parents

*** Please report new bugs here! ***

Moderators: XnTriq, helmut, xnview, Dreamer

Post Reply
User avatar
schultzter
Posts: 27
Joined: Tue Aug 26, 2014 4:38 pm
Location: Montreal, Qc
Contact:

Moved category does not inherit parents

Post 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:

Code: Select all

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,
Version 0.72 x64 (Dec 19 2014) on Arch Linux

Headed for the second star to the right and straight on 'til morning...
User avatar
xnview
Author of XnView
Posts: 43328
Joined: Mon Oct 13, 2003 7:31 am
Location: France
Contact:

Re: Moved category does not inherit parents

Post 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...
Pierre.
User avatar
m.Th.
XnThusiast
Posts: 1662
Joined: Wed Aug 16, 2006 6:31 am
Contact:

Re: Moved category does not inherit parents

Post by m.Th. »

Hmmm.... Mhmmm... Hummm....

Take care at this. If we have:

Code: Select all

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"
m. Th.

- Dark Themed XnViewMP 1.6 64bit on Win11 x64 -
User avatar
schultzter
Posts: 27
Joined: Tue Aug 26, 2014 4:38 pm
Location: Montreal, Qc
Contact:

Re: Moved category does not inherit parents

Post 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:

Code: Select all

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,
Version 0.72 x64 (Dec 19 2014) on Arch Linux

Headed for the second star to the right and straight on 'til morning...
User avatar
m.Th.
XnThusiast
Posts: 1662
Joined: Wed Aug 16, 2006 6:31 am
Contact:

Re: Moved category does not inherit parents

Post 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"
m. Th.

- Dark Themed XnViewMP 1.6 64bit on Win11 x64 -
Post Reply