ArticlesWhat requirements do WordPress plus PhotoQ meet?
| Id | Pri | Requirement | Pass? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GEN1 | C | Accessible by a typical web-browser | Y | |
| GEN2 | I | Active development of new features | Y | |
| OWN1 | C | Ownership of photos is retained by me. | Y | |
| OWN2 | C | Future-proofed against money running out: mine or yours | Y | |
| OWN3 | I | Ownership of meta-data is retained by me. | Y | |
| CAT1 | C | Photographs grouped into albums by event | Y | Categories |
| CAT2 | C | Photographs tagged with people | Y | Tags |
| CAT3 | I | Photographs tagged with locations, objects, activities | Y | Tags |
| CAT4 | I | Performers tagged with real and stage names. | Y | Tags |
| CAT5 | I | Attribution of photographer details | N | |
| CAT6 | I | Attribution of copyright owner’s details | N | |
| CAT7 | I | Rating of photographs | N | Plugins might be available |
| CAT8 | I | Sorting/Filtering by rating | N | Plugins might be available |
| CAT9 | D | Albums grouped by type | Y? | Yes, there are subcategories, but they achieve little. Theme support? |
| CAT10 | D | Albums grouped by date | Y | Manually sort, within subcategories |
| CAT11 | D | Areas or points of photograph tagged | N | |
| CAT12 | D | Simple contact management of subjects | N | |
| CAT13 | D | Hidden fields on contacts to distinguish like-named people | N | |
| CAT14 | D | Tagging of anonymous people to enable searching | N | |
| CAT15 | D | Corrections to names update everywhere | Y | With tag-management plugins |
| CAT16 | D | Attribution of copyright details | N | |
| CAT17 | D | Control over (default) ordering | N | Date only, I think. |
| S+L1 | C | Link to other photos with same tag within an album | Y | |
| S+L2 | I | Associate URLs with subjects, that are displayed. | N | |
| S+L3 | I | Link to other photos with same tag across my albums | Y | |
| S+L4 | I | Search of tags by keyword | Y | Requires plugin? |
| S+L5 | I | Cross-promotion of other albums and sites. | Y | Put in category description. |
| S+L6 | D | Link to other photos with same tag across other photo sites | N | |
| S+L7 | D | Search of album names by keyword | Y | Requires plugin? |
| S+L8 | D | User-generatable URLs to search tags by keyword | Y | |
| COMM1 | D | Multi-user Tagging | Y | With plugin support |
| COMM2 | D | Notifications of appearance in photos | N | |
| COMM3 | D | Comments permitted | Y | |
| COMM4 | D | Notification of comments | Y | With plugin support |
| COMM5 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for comments | Y | |
| COMM6 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for subjects | Y | |
| COMM7 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for new photos | Y | |
| PQ1 | C | Web-quality images shall be displayed by default. | Y | |
| PQ2 | I | Print-quality images shall be available. | Y | |
| PQ3 | I | Automatically generated thumbnail and web-quality versions. | Y | |
| PQ4 | D | Archive-quality images shall be stored. | N? | |
| PQ5 | D | Custom thumbnails (e.g. choosing to crop over shrinking.) | N | |
| PQ6 | D | Support for short video | Y | |
| PQ7 | D | Support for long video | Y | |
| PERF1 | I | Quota > 0.5 TB, if any | Y | |
| PERF2 | I | Low-cost | Y | |
| PERF3 | I | Fast response time | Y | |
| PERF4 | I | Scale to thousands of tags | Y | |
| PERF5 | I | < 1 minute face-time per photograph | Y | |
| PERF6 | D | Free | Y | |
| UI1 | C | Forward/Backward navigation between photos in album. | N? | Can only go by date, not tag? Maybe a theme issue. |
| UI2 | D | Slideshows | N | |
| UI3 | D | Display of many thumbnails at once | N? | Default is very sparse. Theme issue. |
| PRIV1 | C | Their email address should never be published on the web. | Y | |
| PRIV2 | I | Registration and logging in not required for general use. | Y | |
| PRIV3 | I | Robust privacy features for photographs | N | Password-protection only? |
| WF1 | I | Hint to original location on my harddrive | Y | |
| WF2 | I | Auto-complete or partial search on tags during input | Y | With plugin support |
| WF3 | D | Read EXIF data from image | Y | |
| WF4 | D | Support unpublished draft state | Y | |
| MIGR1 | C | API to add photos | Y | |
| MIGR2 | C | API to add tags | Y | |
| MIGR3 | I | Tags can be non-specific to areas of photo | N | |
| METR1 | D | “How many visitors?” metric | Y | With plugin support |
| METR2 | D | “How long does a visitor stay?†metric | N | With plugin support? |
Summary
This is the full evaluation of PhotoQ, the winning WordPress plugin from the mini-evaluation posted earlier today.
The big advantage of this solution is its sheer raw and animalistic open-sourcedness.
It’s all free. I have access to everything, and there is a thriving community of plugin developers. All the “N” answers in the table are merely tentative. For example, there is no rating system built-in, but there is almost certainly a handful of post-rating systems available for WordPress that could easily bent for this purpose. Similarly, tagging is supposed to be done by the admins, but there are multi-using tagging systems available to let anyone have a stab.
The downside is that the administration costs of all those never-tested-together volunteer-driven plugins, and the inevitable theme-development is starting to sound an awful lot like custom coding.
Oh, and there are no slideshows. The hacker part of my brain has already started architecting solutions to that whenever I start daydreaming, but that’s another coding task to worry about.
So, like Linux, this WordPress plugin solution is only free if your time has no value. At the moment, arguably, my time has close to no value, and this sounds like an interesting project, but I am afraid of providing myself with a large time burden for the future.
Comment by Richard Atkins on December 2, 2008
These stage 4 evaluations could do with a more prominent link back to the stage 3 page, so visitors can easily see what other evaluations have been done/are in progress/etc.
Comment by whoismanu on December 2, 2008
now that’s interesting. thanks for your thorough analysis of photoq and thanks for recommending it. i think that we both agree that given the wordpress architecture a lot of the N’s you have above are things that should rather be implemented on the theme/presentation side than on the plugin side. so if you really have that much time on your hands…just kidding 😉
on the other hand i am of course always open for comments and suggestions on how to improve the plugin as well, so if you feel that some things should definitely be added/resolved on the plugin side, please let me know.
one more comment, from what i understand, your requirement PQ5 should definitely by a Y for photoq. photoq gives you many options for defining your thumbs: cropping, shrinking, adding watermark…
Comment by Julian on December 2, 2008
Whoismanu,
Thanks for your comments. I do agree that, with the right combinations of plugins and theme set-up, this could be made to look quite slick.
PhotoQ does give many global options for setting up the thumbnails. However, sometimes you have different preferences on a per-image basis. A photo of the Eiffel Tower can be shrunk and still recognised. A photo of a juggler looks a bit odd shrunk, and a crop of the face is a better idea. Sometimes a bit of both is required.
None of the competing solutions gets full marks for this.
Facebook has a good solution, for profile pictures only, to allow the user to specify the key area.
SmugMug has some quite cool smarts; it performs face-detection, or complexity analysis or something other magic to select the key parts of the photo.
My hand-written code allows you to override a thumbnail, but it requires work in Photoshop, plus hand-configuration, so I stopped bothering after a few attempts.
Comment by whoismanu on December 3, 2008
i see, i misunderstood what you meant by “Custom thumbnails (e.g. choosing to crop over shrinking.)”. as a suggestion, you could maybe give a bit more extensive descriptions of what the different requirements mean on your requirements page…