More visible tags and color indicators please

[mokimac]

Hi all,

I am day one into evaluating PM, so far I like it.

I moved from Adobe Bridge/ACR to Aperture, and now to Lightroom, but am looking at PM for initial culling/sorting and renaming before moving images to Lightroom.

Along with weddings, families, portraits, seniors, and product work, I also shoot little league baseball which entails 1000-2000 images for each day of shooting. Being able to quickly "ingest and digest" in PM would keep me from doing that in LightRoom. For starters, LightRoom hangs or crashes when I read in full 4GB cards, but no sweat for PM Plus the way I catalog the images and rename the folders and images does not work well in LightRoom.

PM is so much faster, reliable, and flexible than Lightroom for doing the pre adjustment/version'ing work,  that it will be an easy $150 for me to spend on March 31sth(end of my eval period)!

HOWEVER, that said, a few improvements for me would be visual indicators in the slideshow when I tag or colorcode an image

I LOVE using the slideshow for culling images, especially for checking focus. Half of the baseball games are under stadium lights where f/2.8 - f/2.5 and 1/500th shutter speeds at ISO 1600 are required, so being able to cull out the OOF and blurred shots is quite easy in the slideshow, and I usually do not need to go fullscreen. I use the slideshow and arrow through the images, bad ones getting a "T" key, afterwards I delete the tagged images, rename, and move them to the appropriate directory and import to Lightroom. Am still looking at using it to added IPTC/Exif info...

So, some visual indications in the slideshow that an image has been tagged or marked with a color(1-8) as well as the option of coloring the entire frame of the tagged and/or colormarked image when in the light table view would speed things up as I would not have to look as closely for the tiny check box or little colored line

Bottom line PM will save me time and adding more visible indications of how I have marked or tagged an image will speed up the import portion of my job even more!

Thanks PM crew!

[dbrouse]

If you are tagging the images and NOT using fullscreen mode AND using the arrow why not just use the PREVIEW mode?  Preview mode will show you indicators for color class, tag and (hopefully) 5-star rating (according to comments about 4.5)

Is there some advantage to the slideshow that I'm not realizing?

Delane

[Kirk Baker]

HOWEVER, that said, a few improvements for me would be visual indicators in the slideshow when I tag or colorcode an image

I LOVE using the slideshow for culling images, especially for checking focus. Half of the baseball games are under stadium lights where f/2.8 - f/2.5 and 1/500th shutter speeds at ISO 1600 are required, so being able to cull out the OOF and blurred shots is quite easy in the slideshow, and I usually do not need to go fullscreen. I use the slideshow and arrow through the images, bad ones getting a "T" key, afterwards I delete the tagged images, rename, and move them to the appropriate directory and import to Lightroom. Am still looking at using it to added IPTC/Exif info...

So, some visual indications in the slideshow that an image has been tagged or marked with a color(1-8) as well as the option of coloring the entire frame of the tagged and/or colormarked image when in the light table view would speed things up as I would not have to look as closely for the tiny check box or little colored line

We do have plans to make the slideshow nicer: they were planned for 4.5 but aren't going to make it.  That said, I think like Delane said, you're going to be a lot better off using the Preview window.  You can see the visual indicators you're looking for and moreover you'll get pre-caching so you can move through pictures faster, have random access, and you can Control/Command-click on details to zoom in and out very rapidly.

HTH,

-Kirk

[mokimac]

Thanks for the replies Delane and Kirk.

Late last night I finally found my grove with PM using the preview mode. Initially I did not realize the pre-caching, and even the occasional zoom to 100% was snappy!

I culled three games and ~1700 pictures in under an hour!

Just curious, when is v4.5 to be released?

[Kirk Baker]

Thanks for the replies Delane and Kirk.

Late last night I finally found my grove with PM using the preview mode. Initially I did not realize the pre-caching, and even the occasional zoom to 100% was snappy!

I culled three games and ~1700 pictures in under an hour!

Just curious, when is v4.5 to be released?

When it is ready.

-Kirk

[mokimac]

I found a work around on getting a bigger color tag indicator.

The problem is when I am zipping through 400-700 images in a full screen preview window on a 20" Apple Cinema Display, I don't want to have to shift my eyes from the center of the screen to the lower right corner to look for the color of the marker. On the 20 " screen it is small and can only imagine how tiny it would be on a 30" LCD.
I fire up Xscope, use the loupe at 800% locked over the color tag and place the result in the upper right corner. it is now big enough that I can see the color in my peripheral vision, which allows me to keep my eye at screen center and thereby speeding up my culling.


I use the  Nostromo SpeedPad n52
I assign keys to send keystrokes, mouse clicks, and keystroke macros to do the following with one button click:
- zoom-click-and-pan by sending a CMD-mouseclick and hold as long as I have the button down.. This works great for a quick 1:1 zoom, click again to unzoom
- mark images with a red tag then jump to the next image
- mark images with a purple tage
- clear image color tag
Plus the thumb control is set to move forward-backward at two images per second as long as I am holding the button down

Using the SpeedPad allows me to keep my hands in one place and eyes locked on screen center to go full tilt when culling