Question from Abe911 via e-mail: I am trying to understand folders vs. albums, I have printed your tutorial but I’m still not sure if I need to use albums. Say I want to have different folders or albums for each grandchild or different cars. Should I make a folder for each or an album?
That is a very good question and actually addresses a very powerful feature of F-Stop: Albums. First, let me explain the difference between folders and albums.
Folders are the actual file system folders on your device like they are on your computer. Folders hold the actual image or video file.
Albums, on the other hand, can be considered "virtual" folders because they do not actually hold the physical media file. Instead, they simply contain the locations to these images so that the original image is not duplicated and does not take up any additional memory. The great thing about this is that the same image can appear in many different albums with virtually no additional space taken up on your SD card. Additionally, any changes made to the original file will show up in all the albums it is included in.
We also provide a feature called Smart Albums. They are a more advance type of Album because you can just define certain conditions and it automatically populates itself with the media that matches that criteria. With the paid version, we also allow what we call "Nested Albums". This allows you to create albums inside of albums similar to a folder structure. Smart Albums can be added to Albums and vice versa. Very powerful organizational tool.
There are two potential pitfalls with Albums, though. The first one only affects Albums and not Smart albums. If a file is moved to a different folder outside of F-Stop, it will disappear from the Album because F-Stop can no longer find it. Smart Albums are not affected unless the file is moved outside the folders F-Stop scans.
The second issue is that Albums are not currently portable. This means that we do not have a way yet to move your albums to another device. We are working on providing this feature but at the moment we don't have it. This also applies to any tags or ratings you may add to your media within F-Stop. We do not have the capability to save this information to the file itself. It is only stored in a database. Again, we are working to add this feature.
We can read tags and ratings if they are added to the file with other programs such as Windows Live Photo Gallery, Google Picasa, Apple Aperture, Adobe Lightroom, etc. Basically any other software that writes this information to the image. This allows you organize on your computer but still see that information on your Android device.
Ok, so after that long explanation (sorry) that brings us to whether or not you should use albums or folders. My recommendation is to use albums. The reason I say this is because if you have an image of your car with your grandchild in the picture you can easily show that same picture under an Album named "Cars" and an Album named "Grandchildren". I also suggest you use tags to help with this. If you tag the image with "Cars" and "Grandchildren" then you can just setup one Smart Album to show tags with "Cars" and the other to show tags with "Grandchildren". That way these albums are automatically populated when you add them to your device (as long as they are properly tagged).
One final note: Deleting an Album or Smart Album does not delete the files that were contained in them. Deleting a folder will delete the media files in the folder but will not delete the folder. This is so we don't delete subfolders you aren't aware of.
