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use-cases.mdwn

Movie Folder

Assume you like watching a movie once in a while. You have a folder /home/joe/Videos in which you drop the video files. The folder gradually becomes bigger and bigger as you add more video files, until there are too many for you to easily see the new ones among the large amount of movies you saw, and you can’t remember the genre of each movie. It would be nice to categorize them somehow, so that you can more easily:

• Filter the movie list based on genre
• Filter the movie list based on whether you saw the movie or not

So you create several subfolders under Videos, and in each you create a “seen movies” folder and a “not seen yet” folder. Every time you watch a movie, you move it between folders as needed. It looks like you solved the problem easily. But now you go to those two items listed above to make sure you really solved the problem.

Filter based on genre? Easily, you just go to the subfolder of the genre. But what about filtering by “seen” status, e.g. getting a list of the movies you haven’t see yet? Hmmm… there is no such list, since each genre folder has its own “not seen yet” subfolder. But no problem - you can you the desktop search tool, by searching for all files whose paths are of the form

/home/joe/Videos/*/not_seen_yet/*.webm

Where ‘*’ matches any name, so any WebM video file under any genre matches the pattern as long as it’s in “not seen yet” state. Again it seems perfect, but after running the search you get a very long list of movies you haven’t seen yet. The search tool sorts them by name for you, alphabetically. But this is a bit confusing, because you don’t recognize the names anyway. You want the movies sorted by genre. The problem is, the search tool doesn’t understand what movies and genres are.

Maybe you can compromise and be fine without the by-genre sorting, but imagine you also want to know when was the last time you saw a movie, not just whether you saw it. And you want to sort by the “last seen” date, and choose movies you saw long time ago before ones you saw recently. How do you do that?

One option is to install a video collection manager, such as Griffith, which helps you record information about your movies without creating all those folder structures. It can even download information for you automatically from the web. However, what if it lacks exactly the specific piece of information you want? For example, you want to record your impression of the movie in words, but the application only lets you rate the movie with a number between 1 and 5. Maybe you want to add your own genres, but the application has its own built-in list of genres which you can’t change (unless you edit some data files directly, but those may be overwritten when the package is upgraded).

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just open your Videos folder and attach any information you want to your movies, and then sort and filter by this information in the exact way you want? Partager is here exactly for this kind of things.

You open the Videos folder, and put there a new movie you just got from a friend. You right-click its file icon in your file manager, and click the “Add property” item in the popup menu which opened. The file manager detects the file type and automatically suggests movie-related properties such as genre, year of release, director, actor(s) and so on. You choose “genre” and get a list of existing genres. If the one you want isn’t on the list, you can just type in a name for a new one.

The same works for the “seen” status. You add a binary (i.e. yes/no) property to the movie. You can even tell your file manager to automatically add it to each new movie, setting it to “not seen yet” by default. When you watch the movie, your video player can automatically mark the movie as “seen” and record the date, so later you can see it. The movie player doesn’t need to know about the specific information you want: It just reports events to the storage system, which does exactly what you told it to do.

When you want to filter and sort the movie list, you go back to the Videos folder in your file manager. You switch to “list view”, in which the files are shown in a table, with column like type, size, last modification date. The difference is that you can instead (or in addition) choose to display any of those properties you defined (genre, last-seen-date and so on). You can choose to sort by them just like you can sort files by name. And finally, you can choose a menu open, perhaps from the View menu, which lets you filter the list by any condition you want. For example, all drama movies you haven’t seen yet. You set “seen” to “not seen yet” and “genre” to “Drama”, and get exactly the list you wanted.

This process of adding metadata to files is sometimes referred to as “semantic tagging”.