If you are familiar with Google’s new G-Mail, you’ll know that they have introduced a new method of sorting e-mails. Instead of using traditional folders, you can add “labels” to your e-mails. While an e-mail can only belong to a single folder, an e-mail can be marked with any number of labels. So, for example, you might mark an important e-mail from your professor with “Important” and “School” labels. Then, when you need to see what important stuff is happening that is school related, you just do a search specifying those two labels as criteria.
Intrigued, I began to ponder where else this idea could be used. Ah ha! I could use this for sorting pictures on my website! Typically I just sort my photos into folders based on event or location. As with e-mails, I have been limited to one folder per picture. If I implemented a label-based sorting web servlet, I could take advantage of better searching and sorting. For example, a picture might be marked with labels “Duke Gardens”, “2004″, “Outdoors”, “Michael”, “Dan”. A search for all Outdoors pictures in 2004 would include this photo!
As an administrator to my photo website, I could add/remove photos, add/remove labels, and change what labels are on what photos. Instead of displaying a list of folders on the main page, I (as an admin) would add a list of PRE-DETERMINED SEARCH FILTERS, given a title and description. This would be awesome!
You see, it takes ideas like these to get me motivated. This is exciting to me, and as such I might actually get it done. Hopefully I’ll have a new photo servlet implemented in the next week or two!