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Image manager gripes and would-like features


Stephen Barnes

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1. Most frustratingly, the left and right arrows take you back and forward through the images which is fair enough.  However, it makes editing captions, descriptions a right old pain when viewing images in the expanded view: you have to use your mouse to position the cursor over the text you want to edit.  The other annoyance is that if you have a number of images selected, any moving left/right (in expanded view) really should move to the next selected image, not the next image which may or may not be selected.  Also: can the expanded view be bigger (e.g. sized to 80% of the screen size), after all, if we want a bigger view of an image, why not give the biggest you can fit on the screen, while keeping the metadata box.

 

2. Clicking on tags to select/deselect requires a degree of accuracy.  It's not good enough to click within the box - you have to click on the text itself, can be frustratingly difficult when trying to select many tags.

 

3. I'd like to be able to delete multiple tags in one go, for example, holding CTRL or SHIFT to select multiple tags, then a single click to delete.  It will make my job of tidying up keywords on 25000+ images a lot quicker.

 

4. The location field is very hit-and-miss.  Sometimes it shows a map sometimes it doesn't.  Sometimes I see the matching list of places, sometimes I don't (but can scroll through them with up/down buttons).  It also jumps from right-justified to left-justified when selected, making editing frustrating - can't it just stay where it is?

 

5.  I love the ability to join tags by dragging and dropping one over another - this has saved me so much time!  However, when multiple images are selected which currently have more than 50 tags, I can't combine multiple tags saying "You've exceeded the number of tags on one or more of your images".  Instead I have to select images individually until the tag count drops under 50 for all images, then I can continue with combining tags.  I've tens of thousands of images with tags "United" and "Kingdom", that I'd like to combine without doing it on every single image individually.  I'd like to be able to select multiple images and combine tags, even if I still have more than 50 tags afterwards.  The same thing applies to supertags - when I have 10 and try to combine them on multiple images I get told I've exceeded the number of supertags - actually, I haven't as there now should be only 9! The whole point of doing this is to reduce the number of tags from the old system, and having this ability would make it easier to get to a more reasonable number of highly focused tags.

 

6. Image Type can't be changed if the images were uploaded as Live News or Reportage.  Some images which have been uploaded as News would be better categorised as sport, for example.  I'd like the ability to change this post upload.

Anything you can do to relieve these frustrations would be greatly appreciated!

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My preference would be to go back to the previous Image Manager with larger thumbnails and the ability to batch append keywords and batch remove keywords without losing the rest of the work. 

 

Paulette

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I uploaded one yesterday, I was a Beta tester and I stand by my initial comments that it's clumsy and fiddly. Not going to bother anymore, given it takes longer to keyword an image than before and the problems with prices, billing, infringements and debt collection. No longer a valid use of my time 

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I uploaded one yesterday, I was a Beta tester and I stand by my initial comments that it's clumsy and fiddly. Not going to bother anymore, given it takes longer to keyword an image than before and the problems with prices, billing, infringements and debt collection. No longer a valid use of my time 

 

A big loss for Alamy.

 

Paulette

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I've refrained from commenting before now, 'cos it can take a while to become accustomed to a new way of working. But I'm not getting accustomed!

 

As others have pointed out, it seems to take longer to keyword pix. Forget about cut & paste too. I can't see any improvement on the old system; in fact it seems worse.

 

Why weren't all the gripes flagged up by the beta testers? Or wasn't Alamy listening to them?

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Google Cassandra syndrome.

 

For now repairing the pen problem would be high on my list:

Making a supertag, deleting a tag and combining tags are all difficult with a pen. Trying to do one thing often results in doing the other.

Please let one of the designers work with a stylus for a day.

This difficulty means there are no or few design or a photo professionals in that team, because they would all be using pens.

So preferably pick someone who has had RSI a couple of times.

 

For the next version:

For the tags, go back to a text based tool for the desktop. Then we would not have all these other issues.

 

If not, at least make all tags behave like normal text: I want to drag tags to change the order; I want to edit tags; I want Ctrl-Z to work; I want my spell checker to work on tags; I want delete to work on tags; I want copy paste to work normally on tags and on the input line.

I want all normal tools to work: Ctrl-A or Cmd-A delete; Ctrl-click would select one item and that Shift-click would select a series of items.

I want the hidden or partly hidden caption, location and description input lines to be proper input boxes.

I want all character number count to display the correct amount and the correct amount of overrun or capacity left.

 

For the mobile version: please make an app that works on other things than the iPad. Or buy everyone an iPad.

 

Cassandra

wim

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I'd also like to be able to cut and paste tags - pasting isn't a problem as I do this at present with comma separated values, but copying tags from another image isn't easy.  Even if the tags were presented as a read-only text field, this would work.

Oh, and PLEASE list the tags in alphabetical order, the current method is a mishmash of tags: if you're looking for one to delete you can spend quite a while trying to spot it.

I agree that it's much slower than the previous image manager to tag: it's great if you have lots of images which are all similar (e.g. 20 photos of a band on stage) but if you've got a lot of different images it is frustratingly time consuming.

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I'd also like to be able to cut and paste tags - pasting isn't a problem as I do this at present with comma separated values, but copying tags from another image isn't easy.  Even if the tags were presented as a read-only text field, this would work.

 

Oh, and PLEASE list the tags in alphabetical order, the current method is a mishmash of tags: if you're looking for one to delete you can spend quite a while trying to spot it.

 

I agree that it's much slower than the previous image manager to tag: it's great if you have lots of images which are all similar (e.g. 20 photos of a band on stage) but if you've got a lot of different images it is frustratingly time consuming.

 

I sometimes use this online tool.

 

wim

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The old image manager was time consuming, the new one is indescribably tedious to the point where I dread having to use it. The new image manager makes the old one seem easy. It would be better to simplify the whole submit process and get rid of the 'super tags' completely.

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Other sites don't use them, but if we have to have them then it would be so much simpler if the first 10 keywords were extracted from the IPTC rather than us having to attempt to click the single active pixel in the center those yellow stars, it takes an eternity to super tag a few images let alone a 100.

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