Hide individual thumbnails

[tomczak]

There is a toggle button show/hide thumbnails in the image browser, which folds or unfolds the thumbnails, making the workspace more compact. I wonder if it would be useful to control the visibility of thumbnails individually (e.g. in the right-click popup menu)? This would be especially useful in designing, adjusting, and running batches, I think, where some transformations can be hidden away from the view to make space for those that need adjustments.

[jsachs]

I added this feature for the next release.

[tomczak]

Thank you! Some comments:

There are two buttons now: one labeled 'Show or hide thumbnails for selected images', the other labeled 'Show thumbnails for selected images'. The buttons hide or show selected images, or all images if none is selected. It's just the first label (popup hint) that may be the spill over from the previous functionality.

I hesitate to bring up this issue (and its's hardly an issue), because everything works fine and it's just naming, but I've been so preconditioned since the 70-ties with the paradigm of Cut-Copy-Paste (was it Larry Tesler that came up with it?) that I can't get over it despite trying. So here it is: to my mind I Copy from the Source to a Buffer (the clipboard) and then Paste from the Buffer to the Destination - a two-step process. I imagine billions have been preconditioned this way by untold number of repetitions.

In the PWP Browser, 'Copy' button paradigm works fine, but a little differently: first I need to select the transformations that I want to copy from, and then the 'Copy' button 'pastes' the copies of the selected transformations below the current transformation. Functionally, that's done directly, with no buffer involved.

I know it all and it works great, but every single time I need to duplicate some transformations elsewhere, the Pavlov's conditioning prevents me from doing it right, at least the first time until I realize that I'm messing it up.

So I have a petition: in the name of 'Don't make me think' principle, would it be possible to maybe rename the Copy button to something like 'Replicate', 'Clone', or 'Mirror', or perhaps something else, so that my association of 'Copy' with 'copy to clipboard' wouldn't interfere so much with my PWP life?

[jsachs]

I fixed the button tool tip (it turns out I needed to change it in two places and only got one).

I hear you regarding the copy/paste vs copy/move paradigms. The tool tip for the copy button in the image browser is self explanatory so I'm not sure what name you want me to change. I should probably change the icon which looks just like the copy to clipboard icon.

[tomczak]

I should probably change the icon which looks just like the copy to clipboard icon.

Maybe that will help me - I tried everything, including exorcisms.

The tool tip for the copy button in the image browser is self explanatory

It is, I can't quite read the beginning of this particular one (please see below), and even if I could, I would have to look at it every time I want to press the button - it's probably the ikon that leads me astray most.

Two more observations:

On my screen, half of the text in some Bowser toolbar tooltips is hidden to the left of the screen. I wonder if they could be formatted somehow so that they are all left-justified rather than centered (don't know, but looks like some are left-justified and those display correctly, both those half-hidden seems to centered w.r.t. the button to which they refer)?

The Select/Deselect buttons in the Browser toolbar allow for plenty of option. Sometimes when individual files are selected they aren't visible or I just forget too look closely, not knowing that there is anything already selected I add to the selection instead of selecting a different set of transformations anew).

Fact, if there is nothing selected the first 5 edit buttons on the right are grayed out, so one can tell that there is noting selected (or that there is some transformation(s) selected already. But this is too subtle of a signal for me most of the time...

But I was wondering if for instance, instead of being grayed-out they could be hidden when not applicable, or maybe some other way to tell me more bluntly that some transformations have been already selected or that there is none selected? Or maybe I exaggerate...

[jsachs]

I changed the icon for the next release.

Unfortunately, in my implementation, tool tips are truncated at the edge of the window that contains the controls, but I did shorten the tool tip somewhat. You can also widen the image browser a little to see the part that is cut off.

There is an upside and a downside to leaving transformations selected after an operation that works on just the selected ones. The good news is that if you want to do something else with the selected items you don't have to select them all over again. The bad news is they can stay selected for long enough that you forget they are selected and this messes up the next selection. You can always guarantee nothing is selected by clicking the select all button once or twice until nothing shows up selected, but maybe there is some better solution.

[tomczak]

I came up with this mental crutch for the Copy button:

- Selecting is really like Copying to an Imaginary Clipboard already, with an extra feature of being able to add and remove items in this Clipboard and the items in the Clipboard being marked by checkmarks, some readily visible in the Browser window.

- Then the Copy button is really the Paste button - it inserts the items in the Clipboard (i.e. Selected) at the cursor (below the current transformation).

I'm practicing.

p.s. Another way of thinking about it is that, in spite of nomenclature, it seems to work like copying & pasting in spreadsheets - there is no independent buffer there and whatever is selected gets copied to the target cells at the moment of being copied?

[tomczak]

There is an upside and a downside to leaving transformations selected after an operation that works on just the selected ones.

That they remain selected after being duplicated is fine - I just wish I were alarmed about something being selected (or not) in some more radical way :-)

[jsachs]

For the next release, I de-select any selected transformations in the image browser when anything is selected from the main menu. This should reduce the problem of forgetting there is already a selection when making a new selection.

[tomczak]

I know what else confuses me: when the Copy (Paste by my recent imagination) button is pressed, there is a confirmation window that says 'Copy X selected transformations?' Hitting OK button, I think of Copy as in Copy&Paste, not as 'pasting' the selected transformation below the current transformation, and as a result don't check which transformation is current as I expect that there will be the second step where I choose where to 'paste' the selected transformations to.