Working with views

Introduction

Photo album views look similar to photo album group tree, the only difference is that groups are being created by you while view's folder hierarchy is built automatically based on picture data as well as on groupings you provide. A grouping is one logical unit of view's organzation, and it may form one or more folder tree levels. When generating view's folder hierarchy, each picture is arranged into some group, which is determined by the view properties to be seen below.

View properties

As you can see in View properties dialog, the view has name, the list of groupings and the list of sortings.

View name

The name is specified by you, and it reflects the view's content, eg, "By place and date".

List of groupings

The grouping list is to be seen more detailed. PhoA supports the following grouping kinds:

By picture file path
Pictures are arranged into folders according to their physical locations
By date year
Pictures are grouped into folders, each of which contains pictures with the same year. This grouping supports arranging unclassified pictures into separate folder
By date month
Pictures are grouped into folders, each of which contains pictures with the same month. Usually it is worth to apply this grouping after the grouping by date year, in this case you'll have year folders containing folders for months of that year; but you may apply this grouping alone, this way pictures will be grouped by the month, but still with different years. This grouping supports arranging unclassified pictures into separate folder
By date day
Pictures are grouped into folders, each of which contains pictures with the same day of the month. Usually it is worth to apply this grouping after the groupings by date year and by date month, in this case you'll have year folders containing folders for months of that year, and they in turn will contain folders for days of that month; but you may apply this grouping alone, this way pictures will be grouped by day of the month, but still with different years and months. This grouping supports arranging unclassified pictures into separate folder
By time hour
Pictures are grouped into folders, each of which contains pictures with the same hour (taken from picture's time). This grouping supports arranging unclassified pictures into separate folder
By time minute
Pictures are grouped into folders, each of which contains pictures with the same minute (taken from picture's time). Usually it is worth to apply this grouping after the grouping by time hour, in this case you'll have year folders containing folders for minutes of that hour; but you may apply this grouping alone, this way pictures will be grouped by the minute, but still with different hours. This grouping supports arranging unclassified pictures into separate folder
By place
Pictures are arranged into folders by their place. This grouping supports arranging unclassified pictures into separate folder
By film number
Pictures are arranged into folders by their film number. This grouping supports arranging unclassified pictures into separate folder
By author
Pictures are arranged into folders by their author. This grouping supports arranging unclassified pictures into separate folder
By media name or code
Pictures are arranged into folders by their media. This grouping supports arranging unclassified pictures into separate folder
By keywords
Pictures are arranged into folders by their keywords. Accordingly, one picture may participate in some folders, and it'll do if it contains some keywords. This grouping supports arranging unclassified pictures into separate folder

List of sortings

After pictures are arranged into folders they reside there, as rule, in random order, and that's inconvenient; moreover, you cannot reorder them manually. To fix this there's a possibility in PhoA to sort grouping results in each group with use of sortings. You do this just like when you sort pictures in the photo album.

Arranging unclassified pictures into separate folder

As you know, this is not mandatory to completely describe a picture. But since when generating a view each picture is processed and is included into the view (see above), there are two choices how to handle pictures having no data for the given grouping criteria (no date when grouping by date, no place when grouping by place etc):

If the grouping has "Unclassified pictures in own folder" checkbox checked, they will be put into the appropriate folder ("No date", "No place" etc) located at the same tree level as the rest of folders, and just at the top of the level.
If the checkbox is unchecked, pictures with no data will be leaved in the former folder, and no additional folder is created for them. So, given the grouping by date (checkbox is unchecked), the picture remains in the root folder (the folder corresponding to the view itself), and if you then apply the grouping by place (checkbox is checked), the "No place" folder will reside in the root directory, and the picture will be placed there, while the rest of folders (with place specified) will be created under the date folders; thus picture classification by place will reside on different folder tree levels.

This feature (obvious) is not applicable with grouping by picture file path since there are no pictures with no files, and there are no files without paths (at least I've heard nothing of it ;).

Copying view's folders to the photo album

PhoA also introduces the possibility for copying generated folder and picture structure as ordinary photo album groups. For this you select View | Views | Make a group... menu item, then Select a group dialog appears, allowing you to select a group to place view's folders to.