features to consider: ingest preview, and contact sheet ordering

[gdpaige]

Two useful additions to PM featuers come to mind as a new user early on:

1.  It would be very useful in the ingest process to see a contact sheet preview of the files on the card to be downloaded. Then, one could also select all or subsets of the list for ingest. I previously used Nikon Transfer NX, which has that feature.

2.   It would be very nice to be able to sort the contact sheet with the option of a random ordering by the user--dragging the thumbnails around to formulate a user's desired order. That would be great for slide shows, and I see no way to do this now. In fact, very few programs seem to allow it. Ordering is not limited to the alphabet, ratings, colors, etc. alone. Much like desktop icons, we often benefit from our own ordering of things.

Thanks for the consideration.

[Kirk Baker]

Two useful additions to PM featuers come to mind as a new user early on:

1.  It would be very useful in the ingest process to see a contact sheet preview of the files on the card to be downloaded. Then, one could also select all or subsets of the list for ingest. I previously used Nikon Transfer NX, which has that feature.

We call that feature "Ingest from Selected Photos" or just "Ingest from Selection" and it has been requested many times.  We'd like to add that feature.  We've just got some other features (cataloging) that are higher priority right now.

2.   It would be very nice to be able to sort the contact sheet with the option of a random ordering by the user--dragging the thumbnails around to formulate a user's desired order. That would be great for slide shows, and I see no way to do this now. In fact, very few programs seem to allow it. Ordering is not limited to the alphabet, ratings, colors, etc. alone. Much like desktop icons, we often benefit from our own ordering of things.

Photo Mechanic has been able to do this since version 4.5.  It is called an Arrangement sort.  Just change your Sort popup menu in the toolbar to 'Arrangement' and then you can drag and drop to arrange your photos.  You can read more about it in the manual.

-Kirk

[Ben Curtis]

I would love to see an *option* to flash the thumbnails (native, not high-res as we don't want to slow it down) of the photos being ingested in the ingest window as they are being copied. It would be a useful way to get an overall grasp of what you've shot by the time the card has completed copying...

[Kirk Baker]

I would love to see an *option* to flash the thumbnails (native, not high-res as we don't want to slow it down) of the photos being ingested in the ingest window as they are being copied. It would be a useful way to get an overall grasp of what you've shot by the time the card has completed copying...

Why wait at all?  Just tell Ingest that you want it to open up the Contact Sheets as you're Ingesting.  You can work with the images immediately as they're coming off of the card.

-Kirk

[Ben Curtis]

Yes I have tried that, but (if I remember correctly, perhaps am mistaken) it makes the total ingest time significantly longer....

[Kirk Baker]

Ben,

Yes I have tried that, but (if I remember correctly, perhaps am mistaken) it makes the total ingest time significantly longer....

Not really.  Have you timed it with a stopwatch?  Ingest speed is pretty much limited by the speed of your devices (card, card reader, destination hard drive) and not much CPU time is being used in Ingest.  Your computer should be able to provide CPU resources for decoding thumbnails and previews without slowing down the Ingest.

Besides, you get to immediately get started on your workflow and work in parallel with the Ingest that is going on.  You can already be captioning, renaming, tagging, rating, etc. as the photos are coming in.  What else would you rather be doing?

-Kirk