New Feature: Topics

[emily]

A PBase topic is a user-maintained list of galleries.

Topics offer an easy way to group galleries according to common themes. (For example: galleries of flowers, portraits, certain countries, etc.)
You can create and manage topics on your <a href="http://www.pbase.com/topics?view=edit">topics management page</a>.

You can choose to keep your topics unpublished (which is the default), or you can publish them and share them with everyone else.
<a href="http://www.pbase.com/topics/emily">Click here to see some sample topics, which I have put together.</a>

You can add galleries to your topics on the <a href="http://www.pbase.com/topics?view=edit">topics management page</a> or directly from the gallery page after adjusting your account preferences. Just <a href="http://www.pbase.com/account">edit your account settings</a> and change your "Add gallery to topic from the gallery page" preference to one of the following two options:
- display a link to the form
- display the form inline

<a href="http://www.pbase.com/help/topics">Click here to see the help page for topics.</a>

Have fun!
-Emily

[catson]

very cool addition, thank you!

[srijith]

A bit confused. Is this something like a personal bookmark system for a user, with the topics being the folders in the system?

[srijith]

Haa... is this the PBase way of Tagging?

[slug]

Yes, one use of a topic could be used as a personal bookmark system.
But how this could be really useful is as an incredibly improved kind of search.
If you use the regular search page to search for some topic, you'll probably get a mix of good photos, and completely irrelevant photos.
But if someone maintains a list of hand-picked galleries for a topic, it will be very on-topic.
I attempted a topics feature a few years ago, but I didn't know how to deal with assigning a trusted moderator for a topic.
With this new topics system, anyone with an interest can maintain their own Topic for whatever detailed criteria they want. And we don't have to worry about someone filling up a topic about orchids with photos of the president.
They can if they want now, but not many will go look at it.
Hopefully we can find some way of identifying good Topics and provide a way for people to find them from the search page or other places.

It may turn out that nobody cares enough to create/maintain a topic, but if people do, Topics could be a very useful way to filter through millions of photos.

-slug

[srijith]

If the way Flickr has been able to leverage on this (they call it tagging) is anything to go by, it could prove to be very userful indeed.

Thanks! You guys are finally showing us the cool stuff you have been working and polishing for God knows how long. Way to go!

[srijith]

As a small contribution to this effort, introducing Topicize-PBase Bookmarklet. From the page:

Well, I do not want to clutter my view by enabling the 'display the form inline' option, but I do like to be one click away being able to add a gallery to a topic. But as it turns out, the 'link to the form' is buried right below, and cannot be easily noticed. So presenting a simple way to navigate to the form:

1. Drag the link above 'Topicize-PBase' to your Bookmarks Toolbar (Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape) or Links Bar (IE)

2. While viewing a gallery on PBase that you want to add to your Topics collection, click the 'Topicize-PBase' link from your Bookmarks Toolbar/Links Bar and you will be sent to the page with the forms.

[slug]

Whoa, you're a genius Srijith. Very nice.

It's difficult balancing convenience with lack of clutter.
Your bookmark tool is definitely a good trade-off. I'll be using it.
-slug

[srijith]

Whoa, you're a genius Srijith. Very nice.

I get to stand on shoulder of giants

If you like this, you've got to wait till you see what I plan to do next to PBase! Am gonna GreaseMonkey PBase

[arjunrc]

Hi folks,
this is interesting.

Is it possible to get topics to work for individual images ? As an example, when I go for a trip, say to Rome, I may have some pictures that are in the topic of 'nightshots' while some others for 'architecture' - they are all part of one gallery, but several topics.

regds
arjun

[marchael]

Excellent new feature! It's great for those times when you want to get back to a specific gallery that you like without having to look through all the others. Well done!

[5points]

Thank you very much!! A very much appreciated feature.
But - Please! Consider implementing IPTC which is in my mind much needed on a site like this. There are many people like myself out there who use IPTC to associate metadata with images.

[slug]

Noted. IPTC.
I've made a couple of attemps at IPTC in the past, but often photos would come in with all kinds of useless info in the IPTC section, which I don't think the person uploading the image would want.
Maybe this can be solved by having an account option, or per upload option to grab the IPTC data if you know what you're doing.
Would you mind emailing a link to a couple of examples of photos that contain good IPTC data? slug@pbase.com
I can experiment and try to find a way to sort out real info from the garbage.

Thanks,
-slug

[adalberto_tiburzi]

Wow, just wow

[bvaez]

Finally, about time this feature came about... I love it. So far I've been book marking my fav pages in IE this makes much more sense...

Merci.