When adding keywords to pictures and groups, you can write down plain keywords of course. I do so for people's names. But things become difficult when something does not have a unique name.
Lets assume you have some pictures of a friend's house. You want to add a keyword. Do you use Fred's house, house of family Einstein or something else? No matter what you use, it will be difficult to remember when you search for it. A notation to solve this problem looks like this (a few examples):
- s -> some scenery
- s.mount_everest -> a special scenery
- e.cycling -> anything about cycling
- e.cycling.tour de france
- p.tommy -> Tommy!
- p.einstein.albert
- p.einstein.his wife
- o.house.family munster
- o.house.peter
- o.house.peter.garage
A keyword must not contain comma (',') and might be hierarchical with a dot to separate levels (as shown in above examples). For the topmost level one might use:
- p person to be seen
- e event
- o object to be seen
- l location
- s scenery to be seen
- t town to be seen or something in this town
Now this is just some notation. But it is well supported in important parts of fotoalbum: when adding a keyword or searching for pictures, you can use a hierarchical tree which shows keywords already used. You can also replace some keyword by another one easily ("Edit keywords...", for a use case see this text).
Using a hierarchical notation makes it easy to show every picture of a house, for example. If you have used keywords like above, you could search for ",o.house" to search for pictures of houses and so on.
Group view: context menu (right mouse click) on a single picture or many selected ones (see here), submenu "rate".
Picture view: use the context menu as described above or hit the keys 0 (unrated), 1 to 5, or X (same as 1).
When it comes to rating, fotoalbum is able to distinguish several users (see here). So in case several people are rating pictures in one album, each of them gets his own vote. In group display, your rating is displayed in the top left corner of the thumbnail image, while other users ratings are displayed in the top right corner as three numbers: total number of ratings, worst rating, best rating.