Any ideas would be welcome 
That's the spirit that keep me coming back to this community.
I have plenty ideas
I would implement something like the tag cloud for the keywords field because keywords are supposed to be just that.. a starting place to look for more relevant content. Del.icio.us does something extremely cool, and that is when you click on a tag from a cloud (i.e. larger font size for tag words mean more items tagged as that item), you can also click a "+" next to another relevant tag to keep narrowing down to exactly what you want.
For example, say you have a picture of an apple that is tagged with "apple;fruit;red;close-up" which defines the separate tags, "apple", "fruit", "red", "close-up" in MC. This is fine but what if I also have a picture of the computer Apple IIe. See the problem? I have a problem if I want to just see pictures of the fruit assuming I tag both pictures with the tag, "apple". Del.icio.us gets around this problem by putting a "+" next to each further tags I want to search for.
So, MC could render a tag cloud showing me available tags for my items... I'm drawn to the tag, "apple" as a major tag because it is bigger in size...curious I click on that.. then I click on "+ fuit" to further define I just want apple+fruit tags.. or in other words, I want only items that are tagged with both tags, "apple" and "fruit" in their keywords field. Bingo! I then only see pictures of the fruit, apple.
If you are interested, I highly recommend installing Firefox 2 and the new Del.icio.us bookmarks Firefox extension to see more of what I'm talking about. Tagging individual bookmarks with del.icio.us is fun because del.icio.us will automatically recommend me tags that others have already given that website.. so all I have to do is either adopt another user's categorization (tags) or I can delete theirs, come up with my own tags, or add to theirs!
That's what makes social software on the web so powerful. If you think about it, tagging media items in software like MC this way makes sense because everyone will have a different opinion on how to categorize their content. With tags, we are not limited to predefined subsets.. we are only limited to our imagination.
I like MC especially because you can do tricks like make a generated calculated field from your file-path. That means suddenly, if I go back to my apple picture example.. and I store the picture in my computer under "(root)\pictures\red\fruit\apple" I can then copy that file-path text to the keywords field and then from there.. use MC's built in replacement text tools to replace all of the "\'s" with ";". I now have created separate tags for that picture from my file-path automatically. Sure, you could say it's not an efficient way to tag one item this way but what if I had thousands of pictures of fruit already categorized like that? It's yet another way to grab metadata in mass quantities.
I did it with my whole folder of movies which is meticulously organized in lots and lots of subfolders. I would have gone nuts if I had to tag each movie file under categories or folders that I knew already existed. I just borrowed my system I setup already.
Tags have their quirks though. You gotta make sure things are not misspelled otherwise things don't go where they are supposed to.. however, if the tag cloud is also sorted alphabetically, you would be able to see your mistake fairly quickly just as you do with any other sorted field.
One idea I have had I haven't mentioned so far is that I wish MC had an option in their text replacement utility to strip foreign characters / numbers out of replaced text. That would make things so much easier if you were specifically harvesting keywords!
Another idea I have had for a long time is to not only have a calculated field that automatically copies from field to another but also automatically both copies and effectively strips all erogenous characters out of the input text including spaces and inserts semi-colons in between each extracted word. E.g. a file with a path such as "(root)\downloaded pictures\icons from internet\Winxp themes\large" would result in output text as "downloaded;pictures;icons;from;internet;winxp;themes;large" This would be ideal for people like me that not only grab tags this way but also let MC keep an eye on changed directory structures and files and thus change the tags automatically!
Oh, that would be so ridiculously cool!
Author
Topic: Flickr-like Tag support (Read 3109 times)