Photo Mechanic Plus > Feature Requests

Feature request: List View

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syncrasy:
Feature request for List View with customizable view options.

This would be a spreadsheet-style list of image files with columns for a tiny thumbnail, file name, and associated metadata (user customizable). Useful for sorting and seeing metadata for all the images in a selection or folder more effectively than in a standard thumbnail grid view. This is one of the three core views in Media Pro: List, Thumbnail, Media. (Lightroom, which doesn't have a native list view, can be modified with a plug-in to add list view.) Perhaps in PM/PM+ it could be added as a subview/subtab of a Contact Sheet or the catalog's Browse View.

Functionality:

* Can click column header to sort the entire list
* Can edit metadata fields directly within the list
* Columns/fields displayed are customizable by user (and can be saved as different view sets using list view options). In Media Pro, the number of fields is limited to 10.
Typical use cases:
1. To quickly sort the images by file name after adding new files to a folder.
2. To quickly see which images in a folder/selection are missing descriptions or other metadata (e.g., sort by column heading), so you can then select those images and annotate/edit them.
3. To set up, save and quickly recall different list view sets for different purposes (using view options), e.g. one list view set for image annotation metadata (e.g., title, caption, date), another for EXIF data (e.g., focal length, aperture, shutter speed).
4. To quickly edit metadata for an image or several images without having to open individual metadata panels.

Edit 5/2/19: I'm trying to refrain from posting too many screenshots from other DAMs, but sometimes a picture conveys the idea better than words alone...

Mick O (Camera Bits):
This would be a useful feature, though I will point out that you can customize the Contact sheet to show various metadata fields along with the thumbnail, and that will accomplish at least part of what you are looking for. (Use case #2 for example)

And for others, some of this is also achievable by doing a text export of any Contact Sheet or selection where you can specify any metadata field you want. The manipulation capabilities of something like Google Sheets when looking at a large text array of metadata is likely to be more powerful than anything we could include inside PM.

Also, it should be possible to use Find to select all images in a Contact Sheet with empty fields that you specify, though we discovered this is not working at the moment so a bug report has been filed. Thank you for that :-)

But yes, I can see where a list view could also be quite useful in some cases.

syncrasy:
Thanks for considering it, Mick.

I imagine PM's Contact Sheet customization is similar to Media Pro's Thumbnail view customization. Very useful, but (I'm assuming) there are only so many metadata fields you would want to display in a grid due to limited space. And it's not quickly sortable.

Text export is not the goal. The goal is simply to provide a more granular browsable and manipulable view of my image files and certain metadata (akin to the full "columns" view in a Mac Finder or Windows Explorer, or "Songs" view in iTunes). Why not simply leverage PM's database to display a list in the app's browser? You're right that too many fields can be cumbersome or taxing on the app, so the number of visible metadata fields should be restricted to avoid overload. I believe the limit is 10 in Media Pro. I updated my functionality list above to indicate this.

RobertE:
+1 for a list view. Lightroom does it via a plug-in.

syncrasy:
I think we can agree that a native List View is preferable to a third party plug-in. I just hope the PM+ beta architecture and design isn't so "baked in" that Camera Bits won't be able (and willing) to make some modifications.

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