Albums

A set of photos as one story - media collections and photostreams.

A Media Collection is a set of photos that stands together as one story - the hundred-photo album of the trip, the growing gallery of Sunday lunches. The trick to understand: you don't place photos in it one by one - you give it rules, and it gathers its own photos from the library.

An album that keeps itself

The editor asks for an intro (a cover thought: title, a line of words, a lead photo) and then the rules - any mix of:

A tag - "every photo tagged eurotrip". The workhorse rule, and why tagging at upload time pays off.
Image collections - draw from the named collections the library already keeps.
Who took them - only Grandpa's uploads, if the album is his eye on the world.
A gallery style and a cap - how the wall lays out, and the most it should show.

The Media Collection editor: intro fields plus rules - gallery style, accepted tag, users, image collections, max images — Not slots - rules. The album fills itself, now and every time new photos match.

The consequence is lovely: an album built on a tag is never finished in the stale sense. Upload more photos with the tag next month and they take their places - the album quietly grew while you weren't looking.

The finished album: a polaroid wall of one hundred trip photos standing as one story — The outcome: a hundred polaroids of one summer, gathered by a tag.

See a finished one

Eurotrip 100 - a hundred polaroids of one summer, gathered by rule, browsable full-screen from any tile.