More on S and M

[Robert Schleif]

Is there a reason for not marking each of the thumbnails in a series of transformations with S or M?

[tomczak]

My guess, from what I understood from Jonathan's explanation, is that you can't have M without having S before (as in: the output of this particular transformation was possibly Modified, or at least recalculated, since last being Saved). And you save selectively the output of a transformation or more, somewhere withing the workflow, but typically not all of them.

[jsachs]

Yes, they are all marked. S means saved, M means modified since saved.

[Robert Schleif]

I generally use Save Back and save the script, and this effectively preserves each transformation's settings as well as the transformation's output image. Quite often, after I have generated an image I like, I resize to a size suitable for emailing to a friend for comments, and then delete the resize transformation. This leaves the branch without M or S marks.
Rather than an M for Modified, for my way of thinking, it seems a little more logical to mark every thumbnail in a branch with either a U for Unsaved, or an S for saved. Thus a Save Back on the final thumbnail of a branch using the Save Script option would then mark all thumbnails with an S.

[tomczak]

The problem I see with this approach is that it is, thankfully, possible to save any active image in the chain of the workflow, not only the last one. The S marks which of them were actually saved.

One suggestion for the situation you've described (i.e. using the Resize transformation for emailing an image for review) is that instead of deleting the Resize after saving the image to be emailed, turn the Bypass-on it (the white circle in the left upper corner of a thumbnail).

This effectively removes the Resize from your workflow and will not resize the image for any further processing steps, but should keep the S on it to remind you that the image was resized and saved.

Another suggestion, but this one will not remind you if you saved the image (but could be set to save and overwrite the small jpg to be emailed every time the whole branch is recalculated, is Export. It may be convenient as you will always have the small version of your latest adjustments to send for review. It can be inserted anywhere in the workflow, can resize/resample the image and even sharpen it a bit, change ICC profile to sRGB and have separate JPG settings from your regular JPGs (such as compressing them more and/or stripping metadata to make them smaller) - all in one go, and it doesn't affect the rest of the workflow as its Input=Output.

p.s. To my first comment on S on resize: if Resize is saved, S appears. If the Bypass-button is toggled, it changes to M. If the File Open image is replaced, M remains.

[Robert Schleif]

Thank you. Bypass is a good way address my problem.
Apparently, at present, the only way for a thumbnail to acquire an S is to save from that thumbnail. But if you save an image and its script, you have functionally saved not only the output of that transformation, but you have also implicitly saved the output of all the transformations above that image in the image tree. It makes more sense to me in this case to mark all the thumbnails above with an S.
Currently a thumbnail can have three states, no mark, marked with S, and marked with M. With respect to preservation of current information, there seems to be no difference between no mark and marked with M. In both cases the thumbnail's output has not been preserved. Therefore it seems like two states would suffice. Have I missed something?

[Robert Schleif]

I just discovered File Export, which seems like a much better method than I've been using for producing a file suitable for emailing to someone else.
In preferences one can set default values for saving files but not exporting them. Might it also make sense to be able to set default values for exporting files, or for Export to use the Save default options?

[jsachs]

File Export has its own options via the File Export Options... button. You can create a default settings file for File Export, or several standard settings files.

[Robert Schleif]

Oh, great. Because File Save can have Saving Options set in Preferences, I was expecting Export to be similar. I guess you view Export to be more similar to a transformation where default options for transforms can be individually set.
By the way, I'm finding it really helpful to control the command order in Quick Pick as is described in the last item of Help on Quick Pick. Typing the appropriate letter and one number very quickly selects my desired transform. It might be helpful to others if this capability were mentioned in General Tips or noted in Preferences.