OddThinking

These notes on WordPress and PhotoQ are based on some additional evaluation I just performed. They should be read in conjunction with my previous notes on using WordPress and PhotoQ as a photo database solution.

I went to take another look at WordPress and PhotoQ, but I didn’t actually look at PhotoQ at all. I looked at my previous analysis, and noticed one item standing out – a critical requirement that I wasn’t sure whether I could meet (UI1).

If I tag thirty photos of Alice, I can go to the Alice tag page and see all of the thumbnails.

However, I want to be able to click on one of the thumbnails and I am taken to the full-sized version of the image, and then click “Next” to be taken to the next image of Alice. Similarly, if I am looking at all the images from the Christmas Party, I want to click next to see the next image from the Christmas Party.

I know I want this, because my current solution doesn’t have it, and it frequently annoys me. It adds an additional “making the user think” hurdle to navigating large collections (hitting Back, finding where you are up to and selecting the next thumbnail). This is a critical requirement.

Now, the problem I have with the design of my own software is that the page in question doesn’t know where you have come from. Did you click this photo from an album listing? From a tag listing? Or did you arrive direct?

WordPress has the same problem. It can display a Next button for the very next entry in the database (by date). It can display a Next button for the very next article that has an identical list of categories. (It is slightly more complicated than that, but only slightly.) However, it can’t display a Next button that takes you to the next item in the search result, in the list of items in a single category or in the list of articles tag – based on how you got the the photo in the first place. It doesn’t know the browsing method you are using.

Coppermine, by comparison, knows that you are looking at the 5th image with tag #75, and so it can have a link to show you the 6th image with tag #75.

I spent some time thinking about how I could work-around this, and it seemed like a major task. That was just the first hurdle to getting this solution to work.

I decided that WordPress and PhotoQ aren’t going to meet my needs after all.