I have been working on tagging media again and more specifically tagging to an Event where that is appropriate.
I believe this process could be much better by providing more flexibility within Media Gallery like providing the functionality to Add NEW Event and hope Media Gallery is further enhanced in a future version.
What an interesting idea!
Actually, my first reaction was that it was a bad idea. After a little more thought, I've mellowed on the idea just a little bit. Let me elaborate.
Obviously, there is appeal to any changes to RM to prevent you from being stuck in one screen while needing to be temporarily in another screen without losing your place in the first screen. This is a common problem throughout the RM user interface, and it's not one that has an easy solution. There are numerous wishes and discussions on this forum about how to improve this situation, and users resort to all kinds of elaborate workarounds such as running stanard RM in one window while running RM-To-Go against a copy of the same database in another window. And I note in passing that running standard RM in one window with the same database open twice in two panes within the one window does nothing to mitigate the situation.
The reason I was thinking that your wish was a bad idea is that it seems to me that most media that you might wish to tag to an event would more properly be tagged either to a source for that event or to a citation for that event. I do understand the appeal to tagging media to the event itself because it makes the media much more visible in the Edit Person screen than does tagging media to a source or citation. But the fact that media for sources and citations is so hard to find in the Edit Person screen (darn near invisible, and you have to dig really deep) is a problem in the design of the user interface, not a problem in the concept of tagging media to sources and citations. And having the media associated with the source or citation means that the media is available anywhere the source has been cited or anywhere a citation has been memorized and pasted (although memorize and paste of citations has its own set of problems).
Be that as I may, what made me mellow a bit about your idea was the realization that your concept could apply not just to events but to any other place where media can be tagged to any of the following (taken directly off the drop down box in the user interface): Person, Family, Event, Source, Citation, Place, Place Detail, and Name. Of course "Name" in this context is a misnomer since it really only applies to an Alternate Name, but for example what if you could tag media to an Alternate Name that didn't yet exist and be able to stay in the tagging dialog while you added the Alternate Name?
To tag to some of the possible target destinations would require changes in the support for those targets, but such changes are badly needed anyway. For example, you can add a new source that's freestanding in the sense that the newly added source is not yet associated with any citation. But you cannot add a new place or a new place/place details pair that is not yet associated with an event. If there were a proper Place Manager (as opposed to the current Place List), surely it would be a good idea to be able to add new freestanding places in preparation for their subsequent use.
An even more stark example is citations. It goes back to the problem that memorize and paste is creating a totally separate copy of the citation each time you paste. If you have source which is a book called "The Doe Family of Boondock County" and if you have many different citations of "page 97" of the book, then to tag an image of page 97 to each of the citations of page 97 you have to tag each one separately. And from the point of view of the media tagging dialog, the problem is far worse than that. The dialog doesn't even show you the detail part of the source/source detail pair (e.g., you don't even see the "page 97" part of the citation). So if you try to tag media to citations from the media tagging dialog, you are flying completely blind. It's almost enough to make me put all my source information into completely split Master Sources and to quit using the Source Detail information. But wait - I already did that!
Jerry
