Gallery UX

Given that the main principle behind the gallery is ease of use, and some sort of flexibility and reusability, I've created three basic use scenarios that should help me write down the application. But first of all some definitions:

The image is described with:

1. a descriptive information:
   • a mandatory field title (given by default by the name of the file)
   • technique used
   • place taken
   • ...
2. a free (?) list of tags/labels (we don't know yet if these have to be defined before hand or not)

Use cases

1. User uploads the images, images are shown in the user gallery
2. User creates one or more collections (sort of virtual directories), uploads the images, then associates the images to one of the previously created collections. The first two steps (creating the collections and uploading the images) are interchangeable. When creating the collection the user will be redirected to the view of the collection, uploading images from there will associate the images automatically to the collection, he can choose differently from -like- a drop-down box. Collections cannot be associated to other collections (although that's doable, I do see little or no usefulness in it).
3. See step 2, in addition to it, the user can organise the images inside the collection, using filters: a theoretically infinite number of filters can be applied to the current collection, each step of filtering is applied to the result of the previous filter. Each filter can use either one of the description fields of the image, or one of the tags (given that all tags created by a user are available regardless of the image/collection). This last step can be used to do searches (maybe I should investigate further down this path: e.g. if the result of filters A and B are actually interchangeable), and to narrow down the selection of images a possible visitor can apply.

Some mockups

1. User generated gallery with images in a collection with filters already applied