Thinking about how to optimize image selection

[Joe]

Robert, I hope your family health situation is resolved/much improved.

I have been using mouse navigation and have lost a number of selections 
by accidentally clicking instead of ctrl/shift clicking. I will try the 
keyboard navigation method. It seems much better.

I don't have any specific ideas, but the main project I work with is 
AutoKey. If you have any workflow steps that involve the same set of 
keyboard and/or mouse actions used repeatedly, you can relatively easily 
write an AutoKey script (in Python) to do it for you with the press of a 
hotkey (shortcut). It also supports phrases (similar to autocorrect, but 
more powerful) which will "type" common snippets of text for 
descriptions, etc. triggered by hotkeys or by trigger abbreviations. 
AutoKey emits keyboard and mouse events that appear to be you doing them 
and most application programs can't tell the difference so it just works.

Joe

On 12/3/23 21:31, Robert Krawitz wrote:
> On 12/3/23 20:24, Andreas Schleth via KPhotoAlbum wrote:
>> Hi Robert,
>>
>> do you really use the mouse at all to navigate through the images in thumbnail mode?
> I've never thought to try navigating through the images in thumbnail mode.  Thus far I've used small
> thumbnails to save space and build time, but maybe that's false economy (the space really isn't very
> much, and the thumbnail build time isn't labor intensive).
>
>> If tagging with the letter tags in thumbnail view, I only use the keyboard. Same with the viewer.
> I only use the keyboard in the viewer.
>
>> One hand on the arrow/pg-up/down keys, the other on the selected letter - ready to strike anytime.
>> In the time it would take to find my mouse (you mention some middle button action) I could easily
>> flip through several images in the viewer.
> I was envisioning my right hand on my mouse and scrolling with the wheel.  Maybe I'll try your
> technique and see how that works.
>
>> However, I could imagine a keyboard shortcut to "raise" a thumbnail to full screen size as long as
>> the button is held down. On my keyboard (DE layout) the "^" would be the logical key (top left and
>> somewhat meaningful). Whether this would be faster than the two-pass method has to be seen.
> That wouldn't be a very useful key on my (en_US) layout keyboard (shift-6).  Perhaps the alt key
> would be more universally available?  That keyboard shortcut would certainly be useful.
>
>> Another idea would be a shortcut to switch the mouse to "inspect mode" beforehand (as with the new
>> crtl-t to enter tag mode in the viewer), so a simple mouse-down would suffice - maybe even to blow
>> up the image to 1:1 px per px view with mouse pan ...
> My kpa is a bit out of date and I therefore have tag mode always enabled (why was this changed?).
> My hope is to avoid using the full-fledged viewer as much as possible.