Author Topic: Philosophical change to which files to catalog  (Read 3196 times)

Offline Marv

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Philosophical change to which files to catalog
« on: July 27, 2020, 05:45:37 AM »
Hi Kirk,

Please consider a philosophical change to the question of “what to catalog?”  Currently Photo Mechanic Plus catalogs every file type it understands and the user must explicitly exclude undesired files from the catalog.  I propose that  the default behavior for PM+  is to include only files that are explicitly stated.  My rationale for this is simple:  I currently have a moderate collection containing many file  types (psd, tiff, afphoto, afdesign, fpa, auh, etc.).  I save all documents in their native formats, but I also save each file as a jpg.  To keep my catalog small and simple, I only catalog the jpgs since the other formats are redundant from my cataloging perspective.    Currently, I have nearly one million jpgs cataloged. Adding the other formats would increase the size of my database, but would do nothing to aid me in finding desired images.

PM+ continually increases the types of files it can catalog.  Unfortunately, so do I as I periodically add new software to my set of tools. Currently, for every new filetype, I must remember to exclude its addition from my catalog.  Changing to the “explicitly included” model, I would not need to change anything since the new file types are excluded by default (after I set .jpg to be the only filetype to be cataloged).

I recognize that many of your customers may want to catalog everything.  The default list of files to import could be “*.*”  to include everything.  For people like me, the list could easily be changed to .jpg or whichever files we need to include.   This is a much simpler process to manage from the end users’ perspective.

Thanks for your consideration.

Marv

Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: Philosophical change to which files to catalog
« Reply #1 on: July 27, 2020, 07:47:40 AM »
Marv,

I could add a popup menu that allows two choices:

Include all file types except:
Include only these file types:

And then the existing field that accepts a list of filename extensions would follow.

Simple enough to add and easy for the user to understand.

-Kirk

Offline Marv

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Re: Philosophical change to which files to catalog
« Reply #2 on: July 27, 2020, 08:24:09 PM »
That would be wonderful!

Thanks Kirk!
Marv

Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: Philosophical change to which files to catalog
« Reply #3 on: July 31, 2020, 05:12:39 PM »
I added your feature request in Beta 20: http://forums.camerabits.com/index.php?topic=13460.0

Please give it a try.  Note: the filename extensions have to match when using the option you requested.  So if you have .JPG and .JPEG, and even .JPE files, and you want all of them, you'll have to enter: JPEG;JPG;JPE

Case does not matter.

-Kirk

Offline Marv

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Re: Philosophical change to which files to catalog
« Reply #4 on: August 02, 2020, 06:11:26 AM »
Thank you Kirk!!! 

Marv