Thinking about how to optimize image selection

[Robert Krawitz]

On 12/4/23 14:10, Joe wrote:
> 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 tried it this afternoon.  It was a bit clunky.  I'm not sure how much faster it would be than my
current viewer-based method, especially without a way to be able to temporarily view the image at
high resolution.

> 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).
That's something I've been able to optimize out of my workflow.  Tokens in KPA are a great way to
minimize keystrokes, and as I noted I've patched rawtherapee to allow making the crop tool sticky
(rawtherapee's crop tool is a lot more efficient than darktable's; it takes a single click/drag
gesture, while darktable and most other things I've tried require two click/drags from opposite
corners unless the desired crop frame aligns with two perpendicular edges).

Here's another idea: an alternate thumbnail mode that can be toggled that behaves as follows:

1) Any alphabetic keystroke (a valid token) is applied to (or removed) from the image the mouse is over.
2) Clicking on an image temporarily expands it to full screen until the mouse button is released.
Either middle-click or shift-click temporarily expands it to pixel resolution, where it can be
panned.  A no-click alternative might be to expand whatever image the mouse is over if the shift key
is held down and the mouse moved.

This means using the mouse with one hand while applying the token with the other.  I'm not sure how
this would work on a tablet, but that isn't how I use it.