Image manager Primary & Secondary categories.

[ottertrack]

Among other non-user friendly aspects of the new Image Manager is selection process for Primary & Secondary categories.  The 25 options seem like they'd easily fit at one time on a larger drop down menu box but Alamy made the box so small that only 10 categories can be viewed at a time, requiring extra scrolling.  It might sound like a silly little nitpick, but the time required for this ads up, and it's frustrating because it seems like such an obviously poor design where doing it right would have been so easy.

 

Here's Alamy's initial response to my suggestion to make life easier for contributors by eliminating the need to scroll through categories:

 

"We have no plans to add this feature to the categories list as the current set up works fine.  If in future this feature doesn’t work we will look at improvements."

 

Here's the response I sent to Alamy:  But I don’t understand why you say the feature works just fine and there are no plans to improve it when the simple modification I suggested would obviously make it much more user friendly.  Are you serious that you’ll only look at improvements when something is completely broken as opposed to improving weaknesses as they’re found?

 

And here's Alamy's response to mine: 

 

"We don’t see this feature as being weak and we haven’t had any other contributors experiencing issues with it.  We have a long list of improvements to make and at the moment this modification isn’t a priority."

 

So I guess one question is, do any of you other contributors experience this as an issue?

 

Also, while on the topic of Alamy's seeming disregard for how user-friendly the new image manager is, I'm very disappointed that they didn't improve the model & property release component by incorporating a suggestion made years ago to include a folder that photographers could put old releases in so that when we scroll through the release list to attach one to an image we don't have to scroll through a potentially huge list that includes every release we've ever uploaded.  If we were able to transfer old ones that we no longer need handy into a separate folder that would sure save time.  Any thoughts on that?

[NYCat]

I have problems also with the categories. Don't know if I could do something differently but often I find that the animal choice doesn't even show since it is way at the top. What I do now is choose something random in the middle and click again. At that point I can see the animals. My other most frequent category is travel and I do usually have to scroll but at least it appears.

 

Paulette

[Stephen Barnes]

"Travel" is a bit of a bug-bear of mine - images of airplanes, hotels, etc could be travel.  However, what about a photograph of the Eiffel Tower?  It's only travel if you don't live there!  I have ended up categorising lots of photographs taken in Belfast as "Travel" as there isn't anything more appropriate.

Then there is obvious omissions such as politics, policing, military, society etc.  I end up just lumping these into News and Events even though often they are stock, and not news events.

The problem with changing them now is that it would involve reclassifying a few thousand photographs.

 

[wiskerke]

5 hours ago, Stephen Barnes said:

"Travel" is a bit of a bug-bear of mine - images of airplanes, hotels, etc could be travel.  However, what about a photograph of the Eiffel Tower?  It's only travel if you don't live there! 

 

Have a look at AoA for %foreign%, %abroad% or %overseas%.

;-)

 

wim

[Stephen Barnes]

On 2017-6-21 at 15:08, wiskerke said:

 

Have a look at AoA for %foreign%, %abroad% or %overseas%.

 

 

LOL! Very true!