| Blog Post Published on: | 26th October 2022 |
| Title: | A Proposed Photo Ownership Policy for a CPC Photo Archive |
| Lead Author: | Fred M. Beshears |
| Type of Blog Post: | cpc_archive |
As some of you know from one of my earlier blog posts [1], I’m working on a website [2] that is primarily intended to comprise two related website applications (aka components):
In this blog post, I explain how the MyCirclePines website tries to bridge these two website applications. Also, I believe what follows may also help explain the difference between what I have in mind for a photo-archive and what we already have on the CPC FB Group site.
We can already upload and tag photos on the CPC FB Group site, so some Circle Piners may be wondering why we would need a photo-archive, as has been proposed for the MyCirclePines website.
This article helps explain the difference between these two website applications: one is supposed to be rather free-wheeling, while the other is supposed to be better organized and more under control.
Also, there are some Circle Piners who really do not want to use Facebook for a variety of reasons. So, my hope is that the MyCirclePines website will give these Circle Piners a way to upload photos etc. with the photo-sharing component of MyCirclePines.
Currently, one can go to the MyCirclePines site and sign-up for an account with just a viable email address. In the future, there may be more restrictions. For example, at some point MyCirclePines may use a list of email addresses of current members of Circle Pines further limit access to the website.
In any event, anyone with a viable email account can sign up to see the small set of photos posted on the MyCirclePines site. Once someone has signed-in, they can also upload photos and tag the photos that they’ve submitted. Further, they can edit the picture, title, description, and tags of the photo record associated with the photo they’ve uploaded. And, finally, they can delete any of the photo records associated with their account on MyCirclePines.
In database lingo, these actions are know as CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete). The authenticated end-user who has submitted a photo has full CRUD privileges for the database record associated with that photo (i.e. the “database record” being the owner_id, title, description, picture_id, and tags in a row in one of the database’s tables).
Other authenticated end-users have read-access to the photos that have been uploaded to MyCirclePines. They can also append comments to a give photo record they’re viewing. If they do, they are the “owner” of their comment. In other words, they have full CRUD privileges for all of the comments they’ve made to any photo record.
Also, for the uninitiated, an “authenticated end-user” is someone who has signed-up for an account and has subsequently been successful at signing into that account by giving the right UserName (i.e. someone’s email-address) and Password.
(Please note: the password you use for your email account is not what you want to use as a password for your MyCirclePines account. The two accounts are distinct from one another, and your email account is probably much more important.)
The “photo ownership” policy for authenticated end-users is based on the idea of ‘owned rows’. There’s a table in the MyCirclePines database called Photos. Each row in that table is ‘owned’ by the account owner that submitted the photo to MyCirclePines.
There is at least one special account owner, admin, who is a superuser. There may be other administrators for MyCirclePines in the future, but right now there’s just one: admin. All other account owners are regular end-users.
When a regular end-user submits a photo, it is done under the auspices of the photo-sharing component of MyCirclePines. The end-user who submits a photo is considered the “owner” of that photo, but only because they submitted the photo. In the context of the MyCirclePines photo-sharing app, the term “owner” does NOT mean that the submitter owns the copyright to a photo. (The issue of copyright is worthy of another blog post or two or ten!)
However, when the admin submits a photo, it is done under the auspices of the photo-archive component of MyCirclePines, which is the subject that we will turn to next.
In contrast to Photo-sharing component of MyCirclePines, the Photo-archive component is supposed to be far more orderly, efficient, and well organized.
The best way to see the difference is to remember that the only photo records in the Photo-archive are records that have been submitted by the admin. (In the future, there may be other photo-archive administrators who play more specific roles. But, for now there is just the admin account holder – i.e. the MyCirclePines site’s superuser.)
Part of the plan for the photo-archive is that each photo in it is unique.
In contrast, the photos submitted by end-users as part of the photo-sharing component of MyCirclePines can be (and often are) redundant. For example, lets say that a number of Circle Piners learn about the Gazumba tree and respond by uploading redundant pictures of that tree. Further, everyone who uploads a picture of the Gazumba tree gets to create their own title and description for it. And, they get to invent their own tags for it.
In addition, when other end-users come across one these Gazuma tree photos, they may decide to leave a comment or two. But, when they come across another Gazuma tree photo, they cannot see the comments they made before. So, they may leave redundant comments.
Some may think – the more pictures we have of the Gazuma tree the better. There’s a certain charm to the free-wheeling sentiment that view entails, but it may be a bit frustrating for someone who’s lost track of all the comments they’ve left on different photos of the Gazumba tree.
Things will be a bit less chaotic in the photo-archive, in part because it is technically feasible to check to see if a given photo is an exact duplicate of another photo in a given set of photos. (This is made possible by something called hash-coding, but that’s a subject for another blog post.)
Suffice it to say, there should be no duplicate photos in the photo-archive.
Further, since the admin is supposed to be a bit more methodical than your average end-user, there should be a controlled vocabulary of tags applied to the photos in the photo archive. In free-style systems such as the CPC FB Group site or the Photo-sharing component of MyCirclePines, everyone gets to invent their own tags. For example, some folks may want to tag a photo of me in a variety of ways (e.g. fred_beshears, frederick_beshears, frederick_mansfield_beshears, phred, and so on).
In contrast, the photo-archive photos of me will have a single tag for me (i.e. fred_beshears). So, when you search the photos of me in the photo-archive, you should be able to bring up a complete list of photo-archive photos of me when you click on a tag for me (i.e. fred_beshears) that has been posted by admin.
To make it easier for end-users, the plan is to have two navigation bar menu items for doing a photo-search: