Re: [Flickrfs-users] filesystem layout

[Paul P. <pe...@ee...>]

On Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 01:51:38PM +0800, Manish Rai Jain wrote:
> > FlickrFS is really cool, but after playing around with it a bit I feel
> > like it's also missing some pieces. It would be nice if there were a
> > direct interface into the photostream, as well as a way to edit the
> > metadata directly. I'd like to suggest one possible filesystem layout,
> > just for the sake of discussion:
<snip>

> It will be desirable that, the metadata information can be edited easily,
> for a whole lot of photos. For e.g. adding a new tag 'tag1', can be easily
> updated for all the photos in the set. So, I think in that case, it will be
> more useful if the files containing metadata be 1 file per image. For image
> named 'img1', the metadata file will be named '.img1' (<dot>img1), and exist
> in the same directory as the image itself. So, this will also remain hidden
> from the user, so as to avoid any cluttering, while on the other hand,
> allows using grep, sed scripts to do a mass change on all the .*.meta
> (metadata) files.

Using a dotfile for the metadata makes a lot of sense.  I'm not sure
that I agree about putting all the metadata in a single file, however.
The file would need to be organized somehow (XML or whatever) and then
you risk having the user accidentally break the file structure and screw
up the metadata in a bad way.

I think I would be happier with having one .imgN/ (or .imgN.meta/)
directory for each photo, and using separate files inside that directory
for each piece of metadata.


> > Also, it feels a bit inelegant to have to set the permissions of a photo
> > *before* copying it into the flickr FS. It would be nice to be able to
> > change the permissions on pre-existing photos in-place.
> 
> Next version will allow that.

Great!


> Nice ideas Paul :).

It's an interesting problem, how to map flickr functionality on to a FS.
I wish I had more time to actually help work on it, instead of just
feeding you ideas. :-)

Paul