XYplorer Beta Club
Most people don't need Adobe Lightroom and other sophisticated software because we don't have hundreds of thousands of pictures.
I have a reasonable sized photo collection and I want something fast, simple, reliable, and portable, to search, tag, rate, and put captions on my pictures. Xyplorer is perfect for this because it is already fast, simple, reliable, and because everything is stored as text the data is readily portable. On top of that, you already have a tag field, AND a label field (which is also color coded - awesome!), and can rate files. It's really really perfect... except for one thing - the thumbnail display of the tag data.
The feature I'm looking for is to have a thumbnail view in a grid that also displays Tags, comments, labels, and rating. Have it customizable to also allow user defined fields as well. To put it simply, your "Large Tiles" has the correct layout, and also includes some Exif data from the jpg but is not showing data from the tags file and cannot be customized. There is plenty of space so I think this would be a good place to allow displaying that data.
The "Details with thumbnails page" has all the information because you can customize the fields, but unfortunately because of the layout which is just a list, I can only see 9 or so pictures at a time with a decent sized thumbnail. And 80%-90% of the space is wasted.
Here's the use case:
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-typically you go to an event or something and take a bunch of pictures. Then you come home and put it in a folder called "2019-01-15 Vacation in Hawaii". You probably have about 100 pictures at most. You would want to have a grid view full of pictures going across and down the screen. So you can visually scan all the pictures with your friend Tom, highlight them and then click the Tom tag. You want to have the tags visible next to the picture at all times because maybe you missed one with Tom in it, or you scrolled down too far while tagging and it messed up or something. It's good to always have the visual confirmation that your tags are correct, to feel confident using this feature.
- You can use the comments as a caption for the photo which is a function available in lots of photo organzing software. "Jenny is sooo drunk!" The comments field you have is already perfect for using as a caption field. And when you browse your pictures to enjoy the memories or whatever, you want to read those captions as you look at the pictures.
- Also, in most cases, people are lazy and don't tag and organize photos when they should. So, a lot of times, as you're looking through your pictures, you want to be able to see that this picture has no tags or captions. Then you will just fill in the tags right when you notice there are none, or that you tagged everyone's name in the photo except for your friend Steve. Then you just add Steve. You will not do this if for every picture you need to open up a separate dialog box to see the tags, or even if the F12 - Tags display is open, because even in that case you have to manually highlight each file to see its tags. It's not convenient enough and as a result, the non tagged pictures will probably stay untagged forever.
- Sometimes a use case would be to use the labels to mark the photos with a color. In Lightroom, they have a Quick Flag icon that you can use to mark photos. For example, I need to send these Hawaii pictures to the group of friends I went with, but I'm only going to send the good ones. So I have a label that is colored Red and is called "To Send". In that tile view it would be great if I can Ctrl click the good photos I want to send and the box that they occupy would highlight based on the color assigned to the label (in this example, red). I don't think this feature is necessary if it's too complex. It just seems nice to have.
These are the reasons why creating a view to allow seeing the photo and the tags, comments, labels, ratings is important. I don't know how your code is written but just looking at the interface for the large tiles view, it seems like it's doable. And your search function is so nice... there would be no reason for me to continue using Lightroom just to tag my pictures. Xyplorer loads a million times faster, it actually scrolls through pictures a lot faster than lightroom, and mass tagging the way I described would be a very powerful feature that you already can pretty much do. It's just that I need to be able to see that the pictures are tagged properly just by glancing. I tried using the "details with thumbnails view" but it's just not enough pictures on a page to make things efficient, and I keep thinking, "what a shame... I can see all the tags but there's so much empty space to the right of every photo". So I had to give up. The thing is, I want to import a few thousand pictures and tag them, and if I can only see 9 pictures at a time, it's going to take forever to find all the "Steve" pictures. So I'd rather have a view that shows me all my tags and missing tags by default, and slowly fill them in over time, as I enjoy browsing through them like a photo album. Also, Rating the pictures is not something you do when organizing. It's something you do when browsing, so being able to see the star rating of each photo on the page is probably useful to people.
I think a lot of people who tag and organize their photos do this.
Your product can actually let people use this instead of other photo organizing software if you show people you can do this.
I've included a screenshot of some other software to give you a general idea of what I'm thinking.
Notice how similarly you could configure xyplorer to look and do what this DEDICATED photo software does. Xyplorer makes them arguably, totally not necessary! You have all the fields, AND you allow custom fields which I don't think is easily implemented with these other software. You just have to display them and you're done. I think you would have an easier product to use then most other software out there for organizing pictures.
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