Tags and data selection

[Guy Verville]

I am preparing a new site for my familly which will replace the existing one made in Flash (www.familleverville.org).

While the sitemap will be quite straightforward (ancestors, father, mother, children, grandchildren), I am wondering what is the best solution to allow users to filter photos according to date (year only) or tags (all photos relevant to a child (including those found elsewhere is a site, etc.)

I understand that I can add pages, create fields, put tags on photos. The ideal solution, I think, would to be able to tag with checked boxes (to allow quick tagging). The tags being the pages (these pages would be created according to the name of children, grand-children, the parent pages and so forth). There would be also a field associated with dates. Users (my familly) would have then the leisure to create a page, put, say 10 photos of an event, and select the appropriate tags.

Then, it would be possible to have in the left menu some filtering options according to date or a search field.

Is this sounds too complex? I am curious to know how you would manage to do it. 

The front page (not yet clearly designed)

The other pages

[ryan]

If you treat each photo as a page, then you'll have no problem with checkbox-style tagging (categorization), using a Page reference field. One way to do this is with an image field and a Page reference field in a repeater. This would be a fine way to go, but you'd be limited to uploading 1 photo at a time. Whereas with a regular images field, you can drag in a bunch at a time. 

Lets say you didn't like the repeater option due to the 1-file at a time issue. The way you describe it, you want to have an individual page (like an event) with a photos field, and the ability to tag those photos with predefined tags. I think of tags as being something more free form, and predefined tags as really being more like categories. This is not something that the Image fieldtype does on it's own. It does support tags, but it doesn't connect to an external database of them so that they can be predefined like categories. You could solve this by making your own Inputfield module that extends or modifies the existing InputfieldImage module. But for the simplest solution, I would probably just use the tags as they are already provided by the module (free form). You can use the API to find pages with images containing specific tags.

To summarize, the most likely options are to 1) use a repeater with an image field and a page reference field, and compromise on the 1-file-at-a-time thing. 2) use the existing Image field tags option, and take the free-form compromise. 3) extend or modify the existing Image inputfield to work the way you want it, with the compromise being having to get deeper into the PHP side.