Thinking about how to optimize image selection

[Robert Krawitz]

I seem to have somehow gotten dropped from the list, and a family health situation over the past 18
months has greatly interfered with time to participate in OSS work.

Anyway, I'm thinking about how to more efficiently select images for export/publication.  I shoot a
fair bit of sports for my alma mater, and at games (basketball/football/soccer) I routinely shoot
1500-5000 photos, from which I have to select some (usually it works out to 10-15% or thereabouts).

The current process I use is:

1) Unload the photos from memory card to disk (I have a bash script for this).  This takes some
time, but is not labor intensive.

2) Load the photos into KPA -- again, takes time, but isn't labor intensive.  I could speed it up
with faster storage.

3) Tag the photos with the correct gender, opponent, sport, and match.  Not particularly labor
intensive, although if I shoot multiple games in one day (as I did yesterday), it takes a bit more
work to find the boundary between the sets.  I guess I could do it with the timeline bar.

4) Scan through the photos, tagging the ones I want to keep.  I use single letter tags, but this is
very labor intensive, because I have to look through every photo.

5) Symlink all of the photos for later processing.  Usually not a problem, unless I have multiple
names with the same name due to using multiple cameras.  I'm solving that problem going forward by
using a different name prefix for each camera, so I won't have any more collisions.

6) Crop and correct rotation on everything I've selected.  This is labor intensive.  I use
rawtherapee with a couple of patches to keep the crop tool as the default between images (that saves
me a keystroke per image -- not insignificant when I typically have 200-500 images!) and default the
crop aspect ratio to free.

7) Upload everything.  This is more time intensive than labor intensive.  It would be even less
labor intensive if I wrote a script to do the upload to SmugMug, but unfortunately that's not so
easy with Facebook.

So the big step I want to optimize is (4); all of the other kpa stuff I've already done over the
past 5 years.  Yesterday, I saw another photographer at a game looking through his photos.  He was
using large thumbnails on his laptop.  I suspect he was using some tool on Windows, but didn't get a
chance to ask him (this was between games, and we were both busy prepping for the second game).

What I think I'd like to be able to do is quickly scan through all of the photos using large
thumbnails to mark them for future processing.  I envision this applying (or unapplying) a specified
tag to the images I quick select.  Even 480 pixel thumbnails (which let me get 4 rows of 6 columns
on my UHD monitor) won't let me check for critical sharpness, but it would be enough to let me
quickly narrow down what I want to take a closer look at.

The ordinary selection mechanism (clicking on an image) is not sufficient for this purpose.  I would
need to use control-click; if I inadvertently just clicked on an image (or shift-clicked), I would
lose all of my work.  One idea would be a checkbox in a corner of each image (probably at the
bottom, where there's already space for image name etc).  Checking that box would apply the chosen
tag; unchecking it would remove it.  If I've selected multiple images, clicking on one of the
checkboxes would toggle all of them (first click would toggle all on, second would toggle all off,
and so on).

That leaves the matter of checking for critical sharpness and other effects.  The obvious way would
be to first pass select them as above, and then look through the selected images with the viewer,
but this also seems inefficient.  What I'd like is a quick way to inspect each image (as a full
screen "tool tip", in essence) that would pop down by itself.  A simple hover isn't the right thing,
as hovering on an image would then always just pop up a quick viewer.  One option might be middle
button click-and-hold to pop it up; releasing the button would pop it down.  Of course, even 4K is
low resolution by the standards of modern cameras (my Canon R7 is about 2x in each dimension), but
if I really need to worry about that, I can go back and look at them later, but I normally don't.

It wouldn't hurt performance to be able to link up the memory card download with the KPA load; it
would reduce the I/O load, which with the 8TB spinning disk I use is hardly negligible.  But that's
a separate problem.