Unify Directors, Photographers, and Performers

Development Features
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1

This is a multipart feature request with related goals:

  1. Unify the director field and photographer field into the existing performer section/object
  2. Rename the performers section/object to a generic label that better reflects this unification

1. Convert director and photographer fields to link to the same object type as performers.

The director and photographer fields are currently stored as simple text that cannot be browsed or managed in detail like the performer object.

  • Instead of simple text, the director and photographer fields would reference a “performer” object
  • This creates proper linkage of all contributors in a scene, image, gallery, etc.
  • Incidentally, some directors and photographers, are also “performers”, though this isn’t the main reason for the request
  • End-users can use the existing tag system to denote photographers and directors, and to set default filters to exclude them when browsing “performers”. However, this might be too restrictive as it would exclude people who are both “performers” and “directors”. There may need to be another way to exclude what’s typically called crew (directors, photographers, writers, etc) from what’s currently just a grid list of “performers”.

2. Rename the Performer section/object label to People

Since this unified object would now cover actors/performers, models, directors, photographers, etc, the Performer label becomes too narrow.

  • The People and Person labels seems ambiguous enough (TheMovieDB uses this term for the same purpose, i.e. People is the navigation label, and person is used in the URL)
  • I think this also aligns with earlier efforts by @WithoutPants to sanitize vestigial adult-specific terminology in Stash (or am I misremembering that?), to make Stash more generic out-of-the-box
2

I wouldn’t use the term People to redefine what you’re requesting because it will paint the function into the same corner as Performer with more time and technology advances.

I would consider something like a table called Roles table with all the various positions: Director, Photographer, Performer, Camera Operator, Writer, etc etc and then have another lookup table like links role_id, contributor_id, scene_id that considers the Role types or Contributor (formerly performer) table entries relationships associated with a scene.

It would also allow a contributor to fill multiple roles and be the director and the performer in the same scene.

It should go beyond Person label because we are looking at a future where AI or other entities may contribute to a scene.

It also allows the Roles table to be flexible and filled with a fixed but expandable group of options without limiting or making the options static.

3

Using roles I believe is a category error. People are actual entities - real or fictional. Roles is the function assigned/credited to those people. You browse people and filter them by their roles.

  • People = who
  • Roles = what they do
4

I think you misunderstood the more fundamental part of my comment. Which was don’t silo data into limiting tables like “Director” or “Performer”. That only perpetuates the issue you have now but just with more options.

It would make more sense from a database design stand point to have a table of data that holds general information about a Person or entity regardless of the role they play in any particular scene.

Then have a table that has all roles that the stash-box chooses to use or recognize

Then have a lookup table that associates the person to a role to a scene. Which there could be many of where the same person has multiple roles with the same scene. And many people can have the same role (performer for example).
Like there are many shoots where the star also directs. Do they then need two entries? One in the Directors table and one in the Performers table?

It makes sense to do one to many relationships between person or entity and the roles they can play. Since one person can play many roles in a single scene.

5

I sort of agree, but I would still prefer seperating the two similar to how TMDB/TVDB and other media tracking platforms do it - Cast and Crew. The White Lotus (TV Series 2021- ) - Cast & Crew — The Movie Database (TMDB) for example

Most people are probably more interestested in indexing one over the other but there is still value to both