There still is the Calendar view with Creation date.
But yes, a search for date range is missing.

Yes, as a workaround, at least for me, handling the date that way gets me some of the capability back.

Even for just a personal snapshot album, I still desperately want search by date, and having chosen Piwigo for the photo archive web site I run for the local science fiction club, this is really a big deal. Kind of one of those "what were they thinking?????" moments. So, yes, please, put that back as an extremely high priority!!!

Works smoothly, looks nice! I expect we'll find a lot of users don't realize that *going back* to the date filter gets them an additional choice, at least at first, but within the filter paradigm I'm not sure how to improve that.

What does it actually do? I think it lets you select photos in a year, or photos in a month, or photos on a day? That's a start, and some of my use-cases are just like that.

However, probably my most common use-case is looking for photos between Easter one year and Easter the next year :-). (I don't expect it to handle figuring out "Easter" for me, I can look that up.) Or winter of 1987, or summer of 2002, or such. I *really* want start and end dates. Or on a particular weekend, 3-day period.

Could that maybe be done with 2 filters? "Creation date after" and "creation date before"? If you select both, then things between them are selected? (Possible error case if there are no days between them, of course.)

(Minicon, the local science fiction convention run by the group I run the photo archive for, is on Easter each spring, so our year is kind of "Easter to Easter".)

dd-b wrote:

I expect we'll find a lot of users don't realize that *going back* to the date filter gets them an additional choice

I perfectly agree with that. I wanted to minimize the impact on frontend. Also Piwigo can't directly show the full list of days, because the list would be much too long.

dd-b wrote:

What does it actually do? I think it lets you select photos in a year, or photos in a month, or photos on a day? That's a start, and some of my use-cases are just like that.

I think it's the most common way to filter by date, but it certainly not covers "all" use cases.

dd-b wrote:

However, probably my most common use-case is looking for photos between Easter one year and Easter the next year :-). (I don't expect it to handle figuring out "Easter" for me, I can look that up.) Or winter of 1987, or summer of 2002, or such. I *really* want start and end dates. Or on a particular weekend, 3-day period.

I still agree that Piwigo needs to be able to filter on any specific time period. We don't do it yet, because:

1) we haven't been able to implement the technical datepicker library. We're going to make it. Don't worry.
2) I strongly don't want the "start / end" dates to be the default system, like it was in Piwigo 13 (and since the beginning).

dd-b wrote:

Could that maybe be done with 2 filters? "Creation date after" and "creation date before"? If you select both, then things between them are selected? (Possible error case if there are no days between them, of course.)

I don't think it's a good idea, considering User Experience (UX). Here is a mockup of what was planned to implement


(sorry, it's in French. Date de début : start date. Date de fin : end date)

I personnaly hate datepickers, but I understand this is the expected UX by most users. I really like the fact that I can filter on a specific day or month in just 2 clicks. The way I've implemented it for now (as in the video) works but is not obvious for users to go back in the filter to perform a more specific date search. We plan to discuss it with Alice (designer) next tuesday.

plg wrote:

What I actually don't like about datepicker Vs clicking on a given date (specific year or month or day) is that when using the datepicker you're not sure the filter will have results, while the list of date values are computed so that it always provide results.

The demo here demo certainly offers the user the ability to filter photos that were created (a) during a specific year or (b) during a specific month in a specific year or (c) on a specific day in a specific month and specific year.

Perhaps the filter label 'Creation date' is not intuitive for 'year', 'month', and 'day' because users might interpret the word 'date' to mean day + month + year (i.e., all 3 apply)?

If true, perhaps an alternative filter label would more intuitive, for example:

- Creation Period
- Creation Timeframe
- Creation Timespan
- Creation Time Period

The words period, time period, timeframe, and timespan grammatically/technically align with words that intuitively include multiple days (e.g., year, month, and numbered week).

Note: It might be argued that period, time period, timeframe and timespan could either encourage or discourage users from clicking on the filter due to unfamiliarity with these words.

Note: The words timeframe and timespan could also be written as 'time frame' and 'time span'.

Regardless of the mechanism, the ability to filter based on a specific beginning and ending time period (or specific date) will be helpful and appreciated.

Cheers!

DrM

Last edited by drmaemo (2024-03-23 18:08:01)

plg wrote:

What I actually don't like about datepicker Vs clicking on a given date (specific year or month or day) is that when using the datepicker you're not sure the filter will have results, while the list of date values are computed so that it always provide results.

There's certainly more information there, and yes, information that is fairly frequently *useful* in that situation. I've been noticing the same thing in LightRoom metadata filtering (though it does slow things down when I start filtering the entire library of a few hundred thousand photos; on a *busy* web site that might be an issue?)

(And, jumping back to your previous message, while your English, which seems to be native-level, is vastly beyond my French, which is 3 years in gradeschool more than 50 years ago, with dim memories and cognates and Google Translate I can often figure out UX sequences when I take my time, so posting the French version, which was what existed, was useful, thank you.)

Yes! That design looks like it will let me do anything that I'm used to doing or see a need for. It's pretty elegant. (So long as getting the counts for each year, month, or day doesn't load the database too heavily when it's a large collection, on a busy web site.)

In fact it lets me do things that I have amused myself by imagining the possible utility of that previous systems don't let me do. I don't think this is actually one I would use much if at all, but -- We had meetings every other week for a long time. I might well want to find all photos of such meetings one summer, say. With this new design, I could navigate to each Saturday that summer and click it. I could use location or other things to pare it down to around here (though the archive is mostly from around here, it's a local thing). (I started thinking about that in the context of using various "uncertain date" notations to represent it.)

So, a new design that does all the things I'm used to doing, plus will do more that might be useful -- that doesn't sound bad at all to me.

So wishing you all the best in developing it -- and meeting schedule :-) .