When I view images in a preview window, I am often zooming to 100% to check various details. Quite often I find myself lost in the image, and end up scrolling around looking for a point of reference. Most often I will end up having to zoom out to 50% or 25% to figure out where I am, then zoom back in again.
Some may not find this a problem, but it really depends on the image and the system you use. The enormous files from a D800 for example make it much more problematic (a D800 file on my screen at 100% is about 4 feet across!). Plus, scrolling around with a trackpad on a laptop can be much slower than other methods. And of course images with little detail (lots of sky, water) make it especially tough to figure out where you are.
When viewing previews zoomed in, many applications have a navigation thumbnail visible with small rectangle overlaid that shows you how far you are zoomed in and exactly where you are in the image. Photoshop has the "Navigator" window, DxO Optics Pro has a "Move/Zoom" palette, Nikon Capture uses their "Bird's Eye" window, etc.
In Photo Mechanic, maybe a navigation thumbnail could added to the right-hand column along with Info, Histogram, Crop etc? Or, PM's preview window already contains a strip of thumbnails, so perhaps a navigation overlay could be added to the existing thumbnail (those thumbnails might be a bit small for that purpose, but better than nothing).
Is this something Photo Mechanic could / would consider implementing?
Cheers...
Mac OS 10.9.5
PM 5
