[KPhotoAlbum] Tokens and stacks [was: Re: More patches]

[Joe]

On 08/15/2015 01:44 PM, Miika Turkia wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 5:45 PM, Johannes Zarl-Zierl
> <johannes at zarl-zierl.at> wrote:
>>>> If so, we could change the default behaviour and use the proposed patch to
>>>> only work on the front image of a stack, or maybe the patch would not
>>>> even be needed anymore.
>>> I personally almost never want the default behavior, but I hate to say
>>> that that applies to everyone.
>> That's why I would like to have some input from others. From my point of view,
>> the default behaviour is plain wrong most of the time. To me, the whole point
>> of stacking images is so that one can handle a bunch of images as a single
>> image. If I want something different, I normally expand stacks (but having
>> e.g. Shift+Token operate on the top image only would work too).
> In general I want to work with stacks as well. However, I usually do
> not use the tokens, as it is too hard to keep track on whether I am
> enabling or disabling a token. I rather quick-tag the images nowadays
> and use stars to mark the good ones... Previously I was thinking that
> enabling tokens would be lower case and disabling upper case. That
> would cause less confusion whether one is enabling or not. I
> personally want to tag individual image so seldom that expanding a
> stack and marking just one image is OK for me.
>
> miika
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I haven't used stacks yet - have no cameras which create multiple images 
of the same shot and I generally keep edited images in separate 
directories from the originals - but I have gotten confused when adding 
tokens to images. There's no *easy* way to see if an image has a toke 
assigned to it unless you have the thumbnail view enabled - so it's easy 
to forget and do it again and turn the token off by accident. (I 
remember that, several years ago, there was some discussion of adding 
colored borders to images so you could quickly see if they had a 
particular property, but apparently it was decided not to do so.)

For my use, having the lower case enable and upper case disable a token 
would be great!

I usually select a small bunch of images and then add a token to all of 
them. If (read "when") I forget to then unselect them before starting to 
select the next batch, then all of images in the previous batch will get 
the token removed when I try to add the token to the current (new) 
batch. This all happens invisibly and silently until I inspect 
individual images with the thumbnail viewer.

I stick to small bunches because it's really easy to accidentally click 
on an image instead of control clicking on it. When (not if) that 
happens,  (after a few expletives) I have to go back and reselect the 
rest of the images. Aside from the difficulty of remembering which 
images were just selected, I have to be paranoid about selecting an 
image which already has the token assigned. See previous paragraph.

My partner takes a lot of nature photographs, and as I'm sure many of 
you do, she takes a number of photos in a row of the same subject. This 
is normal, but when looking at a ton of very similar images on the 
screen, it can be really hard to remember which ones I just selected 
(before I accidentally unselected them.)

This selecting/unselecting behavior is the generic way almost all 
applications work. It's probably done outside the application code in 
the window manager or desktop library code, so  it's probably here to 
stay and I don't know of a better way to do it, but having two separate 
keys for tag and untag (like using the shift key) would minimize the 
consequences of making a mistake. It wouldn't matter if I accidentally 
selected the same image twice, so I could relax a lot more while batch 
tagging.

Joe