Add the possibility to tag/filter by place (feature request)

[ghost]

The "Events" menu allows to filter photos by date, but there is no possibility to filter photos by location.

To go further and have a consistent menu with the Music app, here could be a proposal:

• Tracks > Photos (could also be renamed as Recent because it is actually its role);
• Artists > People (could be an issue with privacy if facial recognition is clumsily introduced);
• Albums > Places (based on the metadata of the picture if available, especially if enabled in the Camera app);
• Genres > Sources (local such as camera or screenshots, online such as NextCloud or PixelFed);
• Playlists > Albums (where Favorites has to be considered as a specific case, why not a smart album automatically generated when a photo is liked).

[ghost]

Below some examples with GNOME Photos, Plasma Mobile and Apple Photos.

[Flohack74]

First problem here is that we do not record the position a photo was taken (GPS). So its kinda hard making a filter for that ;)

[ghost]

Then there is in the first place no functionality to add tags to a picture.
At least without using third-party apps such as Imaginario.

[Flohack74]

Ok so lets rephrase: Would it be sufficient to have structured tags like "Place: London" "Season: Winter" or so we want just tags #london #winter

[ghost]

I think it is best to have structured tags if the need of the end user is to search easily in the Gallery app.
It could also be interesting for smart albums.

For example:
Place: London, Berlin
People: Mum, dad
Keyword: Dog, food, ubports (for general hashtags)

For Places, we could also imagine to use a list of choices similar to what exists in the Weather app when new places are added to:

1. Help the user to fill transparently the structured tags Country, State and City;
2. Avoid typos and disambiguation such as New York (New York, United States), New York (Florida, United States);
3. Visually display the places on a world map.

[JassMan23]

IMHO, most this sort of info should be stored in the EXIFdata of the image, so we need some help from the Camera/PhotoRoll app team once they have sorted the exif bug (camera-app#79) and frozen preview bug (touch issue#611/#932).

If required for speed of access/sorting etc, the info can later be extracted into the gallery database.

Location data should be stored by the camera app in the GPS tag
Exif | 34737 (hex 0x87B1) | GeoAsciiParamsTag

Once the user opens the picture in PhotoRoll, or Gallery, an editor should be available to add info as described above.

A summary of place, people etc could be stored in
Exif | 270 (hex 0x010E) | ImageDescription
which is limited to ASCII only
and/or
Exif | 37510 (hex 0x9286) | UserComment
which offers a choice of formats/encoding to allow non-english speaking users a full range of characters.

The EXIF data should NOT contain information such as season:winter since this can be inferred from location and shooting time.