Allow an icon keyword to be assigned as primary keyword for selection, etc

[matgb]

Title:
Allow an icon keyword to be assigned as primary keyword for selection, etc

Area:
icons

Summary:
For icons that have multiple keywords, make it possible to have one only that appears on the drop down menu for posting and commenting.

Description:
Many of my icons have aquired more than one keyword over the years, some because they may have multiple usage contexts, others because I've given them the keyword of an old, deleted icon.

While I might like to merge the keywords together, in some cases I would like to keep both keywords extant, in order that I may change icons again in the future.

Example: I have an icon tagged both ORLY and YARLY. At one point, I had a different owl for both, but currently I have Daleks and Cybermen conversing--I may in the future want to split them up, but currently both keywords appear in every drop down menu, cluttering up my already long dropdown (and, presumably, mildly increasing server load, etc each time).

If the first listed keyword for each icon was allowed as an option to be the primary keyword, others could be retained but my selection menues would be a lot easier to navigate and less annoying.

If this isn't possible, a way of listing old keywords that have been renamed would be useful, as they can still then be resurrected.

(NB this would also help those crossposting who have more icons on one or other site, they can use the full keyword set on both sites but still have manageable selection menues)

Edit: To clarify, my suggestion is to allow people to choose, if they wish, a primary keyword, not to force all icons to only have one primary keyword, I want to supplement and improve current behaviour, not replace it.

Poll #1834 Allow an icon keyword to be assigned as primary keyword for selection, etc

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 25

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This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
9 (36.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
2 (8.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
5 (20.0%)

(I have no opinion)
8 (32.0%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (4.0%)

Comments

[cimorene]

Oh, YES. I've been dying for this functionality for years without knowing it! I have two alphabetized lists of keywords in my browser's notes sidebar, one for icon keywords I'm currently using, one for icon keywords I've used in the past and am not using right now. I've actually thought about making a third list for icon keywords that are the secondary keywords on icons, but it gets time-consuming and confusing so quickly.

[kaigou]

Now that we can edit icon-names to our heart's content without losing the connection between icon & name (that is, without seeing all instances of that icon suddenly pop back to the default), wouldn't that render this obsolete? Wouldn't you be able to go in and just edit as you like?

Because otherwise I'm not really sure quite what you're saying --- wouldn't "merge keywords together" consist of editing "keywordA, keywordB" into "keywordA & keywordB"?

[kyrielle]

But what if you are really using it for two different purposes, for which it is suited, but if you changed icons again, you might want to assign keywordA to one new icon and keywordB to a different new icon? How would you recover all old posts if you had re-labeled it keywordA & keywordB so there was now the same label on each post?

[kyrielle]

Also, wait. If I edit the keyword on an icon now it will retroactively edit all my posts to use that icon-keyword even if it's inappropriate? Did I miss something? Can I avoid this? I do not consider that good functionality the way I use icons...!

[kaigou]

Uhm.

Heh. That's about all I can say. I'm absolutely baffled. I mean, what do we end up with, the database effectively believing/storing that we actually have quadruple the number of icons if we have, say, four keywords for each icon?

I mean, I'm still back on the "lack of way to sort icons other than alphabetically" because I tend to mentally group icons. I've ended up numbering all icons to force them into sub-groups -- which destroys any keywording options, anyway.

[matgb]

I mean, what do we end up with, the database effectively believing/storing that we actually have quadruple the number of icons if we have, say, four keywords for each icon?

I have 100 uploaded icons. I think I have about 150 active keywords. That is why I want this suggestion. Some I would simply want to merge in, but others should be kept as distinct uses.

[kyrielle]

I sometimes have an icon I use for 2-3 distinct purposes. If I later upload a better icon for one of those purposes, I take the keyword off the one icon (which I retain for its other purposes) and put it on the new icon. Other times I might merge two icons that see less use than I thought they would and that can both fit with one visual image, but the concepts behind why I use them or when I use them may be distinct enough that I don't want to merge the keywords or the uses on other posts.

[yvi]

That function is not live yet.

As far as I can see, if you have something like this:

icon 1: key1, key2

you can then change it to:

icon 1: key3, key4

and every post and comment with ke1 will be edited to use key3 and key2 to key4.

This is optional, though, you need to specifically select it.

[kyrielle]

Optional is the word I was missing. I breathe a big sigh of relief - seems like a great feature as long as it's not automatic. :)

[cesy]

It should be a tickybox option when you rename, so you can just not tick it.

[kyrielle]

Whew. Thank you!

[yvi]

wouldn't "merge keywords together" consist of editing "keywordA, keywordB" into "keywordA & keywordB

Not possible with the current implementation of renaming icons - you can only rename to the same number of keywords. I suppose we'll see some suggestions for that when the feature goes live, though.

[kaigou]

Could someone give me some working examples of what it'd look like, then? Because given your answer, I have no idea what's meant by 'merge keywords'.

you can only rename to the same number of keywords

Just so I'm clear (because I'm not): do you mean:

[ICONA] keywords: big, tall, grand
[ICONB] keywords: wide, far, spread

Means that if I want to rename ICONA, I could do: "great, huge, vast," but NOT "great, huge, vast, spacious" if I want to retain the link between ICONA and the existing or edited keywords?

[matgb]

Can't actually answer your questions about the new feature, I've not used it yet, and specifically it's not what this suggeestion is, it's a complement to it that keeps all keywords separate (as is current) but makes the dropdowns easier to use.

[yvi]

Means that if I want to rename ICONA, I could do: "great, huge, vast," but NOT "great, huge, vast, spacious" if I want to retain the link between ICONA and the existing or edited keywords?

Yes, that's what I mean; I am not 100% certain this is true, however, as I didn't test it much and mostly just looked at the sourcecode.

However, in my understanding you could, in that example, solve the problem by renaming to "great, huge, vast", which would map:

big -> great

tall -> huge

grand -> vast

and then add the 'spacious' keyword, which is obviously used nowhere.

I think the problem with having different numbers of keywords starts when you have 3 keywords and want to rename to 2 - how do you map that? Though as soon as that feature goes live I will make a suggestion to make renaming to 1 keyword possible. That would greatly reduce the clutter for some people.

[matgb]

I'm not directly talking about merging keywords. I'm talking about keeping a keyword extant, but not have it in the dropdown selection boxes and similar.

From what I read of Allen's code (and I'm not that good with Perl), this specifically merges keywords together and from then on you can only use the one.

I'm specifically thinking of people that have, say, 100 pics on LJ, but only have a free account here (or vice versa if LJ pics this up)--they can assign multiple keywords to a small number of icons here, but have a lot more icons on t'other site.

Then there's the good chance I'll lapse to free soon (not much work on currently)--I'd rather have all my keywords still in use, but be able to re-upload later.

Which makes me think of another suggestion to make, the UI for removing excess pics is incredibly annoying, won't even let you copy/paste keywords out of an inactive pic, let alone anything else. But that might be best linked to my other suggestion, where deleted icons get their keywords assigned.

Also, from what I read, if I decide to split up a merged keyword (like go back to having YARLY and ORLY instead of this) then Allen's code seems to block this--I'm not certain of this.

EDIT: If referring to a specific icon in a comment, use the damned icon. D'oh!

[yvi]

From what I read of Allen's code (and I'm not that good with Perl), this specifically merges keywords together and from then on you can only use the one.

Hmm, I am not sure where you are getting that from. The source code is here: http://changelog.dreamwidth.org/479221.html and in the comments, it says:

+# the new keywords must be the same number as the old keywords; that is,
+# if the userpic has three keywords and you want to rename them, you must
+# rename them to three keywords (some can match). otherwise there would be
+# some ambiguity about which old keywords should match up with the new
+# keywords. if the number of keywords don't match, then an error is thrown
+# and no changes are made to the keywords for this userpic.

I am trying a few things now and when trying to merge keyword I get this:

Error renaming 'key2, key5, key6' to 'key2': must rename to the same number of keywords.

[matgb]

Is it now live, or do you have a dev install?

[yvi]

I have a dev installation.

[allen]

I suppose I should chime in. :)

I think you're pretty much right that the the keyword renaming isn't necessarily going to solve the problem that you're talking about here. You want to have, say, 150 keywords for 50 icons, and like it that way, but generally when you select your icons, you just want to see 50 of those keywords. Sort of a shortened favorites list of keywords, probably with an option to display the full list if you wanted?

If you really wanted to combine your various keywords so that you only had one keyword per icon, while keeping your posts using the old keywords on the same icon, then renaming would help. But for this? Not so much.

[matgb]

Sort of a shortened favorites list of keywords, probably with an option to display the full list if you wanted?

Ooh, that's a good idea--yes, that's pretty much exactly what I'd like. Admittedly, until Mark finished the code push tonight I don't know how many keywords I want to keep, but several others deliberately have several.

I actually partially thought of this while reading through your discussion on your patch in bugzilla, but I couldn't clear in my head what I actually wanted, and it looked like you were close to a solution. But this is a different problem, and while I'm not sure how big it is, it can't just be me.

Curiosity--if I did rename ORLY and YARLY into just ORLY, would I later on be able to upload a new YARLY? If so, what would happen to really old posts that initially used that icon, display ORLY or YARLY?

[allen]

Curiosity--if I did rename ORLY and YARLY into just ORLY, would I later on be able to upload a new YARLY? If so, what would happen to really old posts that initially used that icon, display ORLY or YARLY?

Renaming does a full brute-force overwrite of the old keyword associations. So if you rename YARLY to ORLY, it would make it as if you'd never posted anything using the YARLY keyword. So you could afterwards put the YARLY keyword on a new icon, and any new posts you made with that keyword would use the new icon. But the old posts would act as if they'd always been posted with ORLY.

[kerravonsen]

Maybe I'm confused, but I want to be able to use ALL my keywords, and it seems to me that this suggestion would prevent that. I have multiple keywords per icon for a reason: one icon can be used for multiple purposes, and I may wish to switch one of the keywords to a different icon in the future.

For example, the icon I'm using for this comment has two keywords: "Doc7-frown" and "frown". I'm using the "frown" keyword, because the relevant usage is that it's a frown, rather than that it's the 7th Doctor. In future, I might have a different "frown" icon, and I would want this icon to still be "frown", even though it's a different icon. But in some other post/comment, I might want to use the "Doc7-frown" keyword instead. But if this were implemented, I wouldn't be allowed to do that, since, so far as I can understand, I'd only be allowed to have one "active" keyword per icon, since only the "primary keyword" would appear in the drop-down selection list.

Do. Not. Want.

[matgb]

Neither do I, and on rereading it's not as clear. I want there to be an option to set a primary keyword, for pretty much exactly the reason you give--I have some icons with shared usage, which I plan at some point to split, but others are shared usage that I'm unlikely to want to split.

So not enforced, not overriding current behaviour, but supplementing, to allow those of us with old keywords to keep them, but not have the clutter they create.

[miang]

If I'm reading this correctly, doesn't this suggestion completely defeat the purpose of allowing multiple keywords to a single icon?

For example, the icon I'm using has "angst" and "sad valkyrie in snow" as its keywords. If we implement your suggestion, and I make a post on Valkyrie Profile, you're going to force me to use the "angst" keyword to bring up this icon because it comes first. If I later switch angst to some other icon entirely, the post loses the icon it was intended to have.

The same problem exists in reverse, of course: if I instead put "sad valkyrie in snow" as the first keyword -- which is not currently possible, as keywords automatically alphabetize themselves -- and use that keyword on an unhappy post, and I later replace the icon with a happy-valkyrie picture, then I wind up with a happy icon on a sad post because the "angst" keyword was unselectable at the time I made the post.

At the very least this suggestion would require reworking the way icon identifiers work to respect a non-alphabetical order, but even then I think it destroys very useful functionality -- there are good reasons to have all possible keywords be selectable from those dropdown menus. Maybe there could be a better way to organize them than alphabetically, but this solution is not it.

[matgb]

Ah, no, it's not as clear--I want tne option--I have some icons that are multi use, and some that are simply merged for effect. I perhaps ought to edit the post a bit--add bold to the important bit; see also my reply to kerravonsen above, with the same objection.

[kyrielle]

Suggestion: what you seem to want is the ability to define two types of keywords: active keywords, which appear in the drop-down, and previous keywords, which do not appear in the drop-down, but prior posts where that keyword is used will still show the icon. Is that more accurate?

[matgb]

Sort of, yes--different terminology and language use, same essential meaning, I think.

So yes, if you could have a number of active keywords, and a number of previous/inactive keywords that would be a good solution.

[triadruid]

I could sort of get behind that idea, but IMO it makes the keyword options even more clunky and confusing (you either have to add another text entry box, or give each keyword its own line in a radio box, or... some third thing).

I think being able to rename your unused/obsolete keywords so that they descend to the bottom of the list would solve the problem without a new feature having to be coded.