Hi, Kirk, et al.
I just helped a colleague caption several hundred photos in PhotoMechanic for the first time, and there were a bunch of places where she had trouble. I'm not the most experienced PM user myself, but watching her, I realize that there a bunch of places where PM could become more user friendly and easier to use, or at least easier to recover from a newbie mistake. I think this is probably best placed in Feature Requests, but maybe it should be in Support?
(It's also possible we weren't using the optimal workflow.)
This was PM 4.6.2.1 under OSX 10.6.3. We began by ingesting photos and applying a stationary pad to all photos at that time, and opening that contact sheet. Then selecting ranges of contiguous photos, applying an IPTC Stationary Pad to them to set general captions and keywords, and then hitting 'i' and editing the final caption, and moving to the next photo with Cmd-].
The first confusing thing is that the IPTC Stationary Pad (Cmd-I) and the IPTC Info window (plain 'i') are very similar looking, but they behave in really different ways. That means that it's not always obvious what's going to happen, and users' expectations easily get violated, leading to frustration. It would be great if there was a way to make them more visually distinct, but I'm not sure what that would be...(Maybe in the future when it gets acknowledged that metadata might not at all be IPTC, and renaming them happens, they could not start with the same word, as well as being somehow visually identifyable...)
1. When you have the IPTC Info window open, clicking "Apply Stationary Pad" wipes out any changes you have just typed into the window. But when you have the IPTC Stationary Pad open, "Apply Stationary to Selected" applies what you have just typed to the selected photos. It would be nice if these were not both called "Apply" and maybe the buttons were in different places or something.
2. If you're going about this wrong, and have opened IPTC Info and typed in a caption, if you click "Apply," your work is lost irretrievably. Can you make Cmd-Z/Undo work here? It would be great to recover from this, instead of saying, "Oh well, lost all that typing, no way to get it back!"
3. With multiple photos in the contact sheet selected, you can't hit 'i' to open the IPTC Info window. This makes sense, because IPTC Info only lets you change a photo. But the user can still click on the 'i' icon (lower left of the image in the contact sheet) and then it's not obvious whether the changes are going to be made to the single photo (what actually happens) or the selected range of photos (what the user might have hoped for). Note that this behavior may also differ from a user's expectation because in Adobe Bridge, when you select multiple photos, changes made in the Metadata pane apply to all photos selected.
4. This machine has two monitors, so the preview window opens in one monitor and the contact sheet in the other. While browsing the contact sheet, it's very easy to open the preview window and then get frustrated that you cannot change the range of selected photos in the contact sheet without closing the preview window. I don't know if it would be a good idea for the preview window to not be a modal dialog, but the current state definitely causes confusion.
5. My colleague entered a 2ndary sort key of {timesortl} as a typo for {timesort}, and we couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work. If there was some validation of variables, that would be handy!
6. The "Variables..." button in the sort window (and elsewhere) is quite helpful, but it doesn't give quite enough information. For instance, what's the difference between {time} and {timesort}? If the Variables... window provided an example next to each variable (e.g:
| second | 59 |
| time | 2:48:59 PM |
| timesort | 144859 |
) that would sure be helpful. In fact, even the PM Help doesn't explain {time} versus {timesort}. It seemed obvious to me that sorting on {timesort} was a better idea, but it didn't occur to my colleague...she is not a programmer.
6(b). My colleague had trouble with the Variables... window. It's organized with hieararchy, and the Camera section comes first. But if you don't realize there's a hierarchy, you look through these variables and get to the end and never find the one you're looking for (in this case, date/time). Could there be some visual clue to indicate there is more to the hierarchy? One (probably bad) way would be to have it list the headings with triangles (or plus signs?) next to them, so the user would have to click/keyboard to open the subhierarchy. Also, once she scrolled down past Camera to Time, her first inclination was to choose one near the top that looked right, like {date} or even {second}, instead of scrolling down to find {time}. I'm not sure how to solve this. Obviously putting the "more likely to be useful" variables ahead could work, but that might be really subjective (people might disagree), and it might make it hard to find a variable alphabetically.
7. With the IPTC Stationary Pad open, you can't go to Help > Photo Mechanic Help. So to figure out what these variables do, you have to close the ISP, open the PM Help, and then reopen the ISP. Awkwardly cumbersome... Oh wow...clicking on the variable name shows you the definition of the variable in the window above? I completely didn't see this, because I never clicked on the variable name, I just scrolled through looking. How could that be made discoverable? Maybe if the variable definition window started out with some canned text in it, instead of being blank: "Click on a variable name to see its definition" or somesuch?
8. This one's me. I find I want to open a folder in a contact sheet, and I navigate to that folder and inadvertantly open it's parent folder in the contact sheet. I get an empty contact sheet that shows me nothing, because all of the contents are subfolders. Is there some reason the contact sheet doesn't display subfolders as icons and let me click on them to open that subfolder in the same contact sheet?
9. The IPTC Info keyboard shortcuts of Cmd-[ and Cmd-] are hard to discover. You can mouseover the "Save & <-" button and get a tooltip, but unless you think to do that (which most people don't!), you never realize there are key command. I'm not sure if there is enough space to add the keyboard shortcuts in or next to the buttons, but if there is, I think it would help a lot of people learning PM.
10. In IPTC Info, if you hold down Option, the default "OK" checkbox changes to "Eval," but it is still highlighted blue. Hitting Option-RETURN seems to do nothing, which is counterintuitive. I would expect it to execute Eval, but it doesn't. (is there a key combination?)
I think that's about it. A lot of this stuff, of course, could be figured out by reading the manual, but new and casual users often don't want do that. And the confusion between IPTC Stationary Pad and IPTC Info can still remain, even after you do that. I know I still click the wrong "Apply" button sometimes and lose a caption I spent a while thinking of.
Hopefully this is usefully constructive feedback and it doesn't just sound like me ranting!
Thanks for a great product!
