Make keywording panel more graphical

[ptakeuchi]

My least favorite activity is keywording, so anything that can be done to speed up this tedious but important process would be welcome. While you do allow snapshots in your panels, I think it would really speed keywording to go the aperture/lightroom route and have user-definable buttons as short-cuts to snapshots. I'd also love it if instead of just auto-complete funcitonality, we had smart suggestion functionality. So say I choose beach, PM might also in a separate part of the window list keyword suggestions like "sand," "ocean," etc. These suggestions would be based on previous groupings of keywords--I'm not asking for human-like intelligence, though it would be great if it could be programmed.    I can also see a grid of my most used keywords, so I can just click to add or drag and drop to add.  Anyway, moving to more of a grid of buttons paradigm, rather than just a single column of text would make me very happy. I realize it is no small coding undertaking, but it may be one that enhances PM's value in the long run.

[Kirk Baker]

My least favorite activity is keywording, so anything that can be done to speed up this tedious but important process would be welcome. While you do allow snapshots in your panels, I think it would really speed keywording to go the aperture/lightroom route and have user-definable buttons as short-cuts to snapshots. I'd also love it if instead of just auto-complete funcitonality, we had smart suggestion functionality. So say I choose beach, PM might also in a separate part of the window list keyword suggestions like "sand," "ocean," etc. These suggestions would be based on previous groupings of keywords--I'm not asking for human-like intelligence, though it would be great if it could be programmed.    I can also see a grid of my most used keywords, so I can just click to add or drag and drop to add.  Anyway, moving to more of a grid of buttons paradigm, rather than just a single column of text would make me very happy. I realize it is no small coding undertaking, but it may be one that enhances PM's value in the long run.

How about mocking up what the UI would look like in Photoshop and posting a JPEG of it here?

-Kirk

[ptakeuchi]

Kirk,

Give me a few days and I'll come up with something.

Paul

[devenh]

I have nothing against a graphic interface, I just question whether that is ergonomically efficient when you are processing, say, 1000 images.  My bias in these situations is to emphasize a keyboard based solution.

In this case, I would prefer being able to apply frequently used keywords with a single keystroke.  Unfortunately, this is not practical as most single keystrokes (e.g. 'o' or Ocean) are more often used for entering text into (surprise) text fields.  Other key combinations like Ctrl+O may already be used.

I would suggest, at least for Windows user, that the Ctrl+Alt+Shift plus letter combinations be made available for custom keywording.  I realize that actually typing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+O to keyword "Ocean" involves a lot of finger gymnastics, but if you can assign that keystroke to a programmable input device like a Belkin Nostromo, then it would be easy to quickly apply keywords during the editing process.

Deven

[vAfotoriporter]

I have nothing against a graphic interface, I just question whether that is ergonomically efficient when you are processing, say, 1000 images.  My bias in these situations is to emphasize a keyboard based solution.

If we speak of a new interface to add keywords instead (or in addition to) the current ways, the two (graphic use by mouse and keyboard use) could maybe be combined.

Maybe a "keywording view" or an alternate view/functionality of the preview window. I mean it could have a resizeable large view of the image in the top left part filling most of the screen and instead (or maybe switchable/resizeable) of the filmstrip a set of kewyord buttons that could be drag+dropped from a vertical part of the screen to the right where lists and sets of keywords could be chosen to be added to the button set (this part could be more or less the same as the IPTC Keywords list that can be opened from the stationery pad.

Also maybe keyword button set on the bottom right could be designed a way to be able to select them by cursor movement and be added with space or enter and moving to the next/previous image should be done by either another shortcut/button (like in Image IPTC edit mode), or by switching focus inside the window by Tab maybe between the keyword set and the image/filmstrip.

Just some thoughts.