Those are good points.  Thinking this through some more, the data for 
the most part *is* already present in the image_attributes table in a 
format that could provide the type hints we need for widgets etc... So 
really the only thing we lose is having this "typed" data available 
from the tag api, which is probably only an issue if using Ansel via 
the api anyway.

My initial thought is that this sort of data really belongs in the 
ansel_images or ansel_image_attributes table in order to make full use 
of it.



My second response is that I've thought about using tags to apply 
permissions in the past, so why not.



I'm conflicted. Adding a type could make these tags very powerful, but 
it also throws out some of the fundamental simplicity of tags. I think 
in the end it's a bad idea; it would encourage us to use tags like we 
used the datatree before, and we already know that doesn't scale.

Changes have been made in CVS for this ticket:

http://cvs.horde.org/diff.php/ansel/config/prefs.php.dist?r1=1.66&r2=1.67&ty=u
http://cvs.horde.org/diff.php/ansel/lib/Ansel.php?r1=1.484&r2=1.485&ty=u

I have this implemented locally, by auto creating tags on upload from 
user-defined Exif fields.  Before I commit this, I wanted feedback on 
an idea I had to make this more flexible.



My idea is to add a tag_type field to both the galleries_tags and 
images_tags tables.  This would be used to indicate tags that 
represent special values, such as dates, or lat/long coordinates for 
geotagging etc..  The idea is we could use this data to know how to 
display the tag (dates could be displayed in the user's date_format 
pref for instance - lat/long could possibly be displayed as an actual 
location string  if we can hook into an api to do the lat/long 
translation, or maybe just a "dot" on a google map widget etc...)



Anyway, that's the general idea, thoughts/comments/WTFs?

And if it's not too hard, for the pref (or a different one) to also 
allow controlling which exif tags are extracted on upload.

+1 for extracting tags on upload, with a pref to turn it off.

Do you see this as having EXIF information automatically being added 
to a resource's tags or to have the code pull the EXIF values 
dynamically when view/browsing etc...  I think the later way would be 
too resource intensive to implement considering how intensive the 
related tag queries are by themselves...I think providing a 
pref/config switch to automatically add certain exif data as tags 
would be a good compromise here.

Make embedded (EXIF) information searchable, editable, etc. Also 
possibly add certain EXIF properties appear as tags so they can be 
browsed.