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Common irritationsCommon irritationsPosted Apr 19, 2005 4:41 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165)Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications
I find the most irritating thing about all these programs is that they use the native "select and edit" notion built into whatever UI toolkit they were coded under. As a result, when I have 300 pictures taken at random orientations, I have to go through painfully "selecting" the 67 I want rotated left, and then tell it to go ahead, and then wait while it moves all those bits back and forth to disk. Then I have to "select" the 81 to rotate the other way, and then tell it to go ahead, and then wait again. Woe betide me if I ever emit a stray click after selecting 59 of them; I have to start over.
What do I want? Buttons next to each thumbnail, one to rotate left, another right. When I click one, I want it to start working immediately (after all, it's lossless, right?) while I go through the rest. It should show the rotated thumbnail immediately, and let me click again at the same image, and have the right thing end up on disk even if it was half-written out already. Of course I need a way to click the same button on a whole course of images; maybe *that* is something the native UI selection trick is good for. Oh, and I want keyboard shortcuts for all this, so I can step from one thumbnail to the next, and hit "L", "R", or (say) "U", and walk through the whole list without fooling with the mouse but once.
I want a red-eye removal feature that, all by itself, identifies pairs of luminous red circles or ellipses, and blackens just them without messing up red shirts or roses (or nipples, or car taillights, either, but I'll take my chances). It might allow its action to be restricted to a subset of the image, similar to a cropping tool, and let you poke at individual eyes you want blackened and non-eyes you want un-blackened.
I want to set up empty columns, each bound to a digit key, and then walk down all the thumbnails and bounce each into its right column with one keystroke. Then let me add a tag to all the images in a column, at once. I should be able to copy thumbnails into more than one column, so a picture may have more than one tag added.
Did even Apple get much of this right? I doubt it.
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Common irritations Posted Apr 21, 2005 10:11 UTC (Thu) by gc (guest, #24112) [Link] > I find the most irritating thing about all these programs is that they use the native "select and edit" notion built into whatever UI toolkit they were coded under.
I have started a web-album oriented software which takes the same irritation as a starter (among others). As a result, I have come-up with three different easy ways to rotate images: mouse gesture (click, drag a little right or left, release), one-click tools (you select the "rotate clockwise" toggle-button in the toolbar, then one click on each image is just what you need to do the rotation), and right-click popup context menu (this is the most "intuitive" for people not reading the doc and/or not used with the first two ways which are more specific). Of course, I also have keyboard shortcuts to do that.
(shameless self-advert) http://zarb.org/~gc/html/booh.html - not in freshmeat or other places yet because I want to finish all the most interesting features first - which is nearly the case btw.
It's not image-management oriented so doesn't aim at implementing too serious features such as cropping. It's more geared towards people who want to create web-albums _fast_.
About your suggestion or rotation, I think that putting buttons next to thumbnails would take up space better used to display images. Mouse gestures are a more elegant solution IMHO. But that can just be a matter of taste.
Common irritations Posted May 10, 2005 16:28 UTC (Tue) by wstokes (guest, #29845) [Link] You might enjoy using Album Shaper.-Select one or more photos and click the rotate buttons at the bottom of the screen to batch rotate one ormore. -Be a power user. Use the arrow keys to navigate and Ctrl+R/L to rotate the selected photo semi-instantly using fast lossless transformations that work. -Album Shaper provides an intelligent red-eye removal tool. In many cases you can select the entire image and the program finds the eyes and changes just them. Other red objects (like red lips) are almost always ignored.
I don't support EXIF data and tagging withing Album Shaper *yet*. It's being developed right now.
-Will
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