Here a few thoughts about how i think the image viewer should work, ideally. Some of the features i have already suggested, but i will repeat them anyway.
the meta pane should remember it's state. So if the active part (active in the sense of being actually edited, as opposed to "information only" parts, like ISO or focal length, which usually are not edited) would be the "tags" field, it should show all present tags without any further interaction, immediately. This is, because often you mainly want to review all the keywords / tags, which belong to the images.
The way it is now has a few drawbacks. The first state is the almost completely collapsed state, where you can see only a few keywords. Then, after clicking into the field, you can kind of see some more already, but very soon you have to mess with a scroll bar in that tiny window - you cannot get a full view of all the tags. Therefore...
please display all tags in a vertical list, which is completely visible. With all less relevant (in that context) parts collapsed, there is plenty of vertical screen estate available, allowing to list at least 50 keywords! I would suggest to have that list expandable (it would remain collapsed, if other informations are important), in "remember state" mode, with maybe a slightly differently colored input field at the top, indicating, that keywords can be typed in there, which then go into the list below. When committing the newly entered keywords, the should be listed alphabetically in the list below, making it much easier to check, if they are already present (Opus will ignore double entries already, but i think it is still a good idea).
another important thing would be, that there would be an easy way to change between meta panel with focus (changing back from the image part would focus the "input" field in the metadata editor) & the image part. The image part could be toggled with the keyboard between "full size", & "grow to page" modes.
In full size mode, we could move around the image using the four arrow keys, like we have it already in the present version (if i remember correctly), to review different parts of the image, looking for details. I suppose, that many photographers are looking for minor details like that in their images. You use to have plenty of them in panoramic oder wide angle shots. At least i find myself very often doing this, so i found some more small details, another Shortcut will bring me back directly to the input field of the meta editor on the right.
Having added tens of thousands of tags to my images, i can say, that i try to avoid the mouse completely to maintain an optimal workflow , because it is mostly about typing or using the corsor keys. So any avoided clicks to activate fields, or drag scroll bars etc. are good for the workflow.
maybe yet another idea would be something similar to what we had a long time ago, the DOSkey command :lol: , which allowed us to fetch the previously used few commands (or, the whole list of tags), per up/down arrows (in Opus it could be different, of course). Many times, images are quite similar to the previous ones, so the input field could "remember" the last used (full) set of keywords, so you could reuse them.
Another thing about the "marker" function: after, or before the tagging sessions, users might want to select images, going through the whole list, & marking some of them. Therefore, while doing this, the focus should stay in the meta panel part, so we can keep going through (or back in) the list, in order to make some selection.
I'd just like to add my threepenn'orth to abr comprehensive "critique" of the metadata panel.
I use it extensively for adding my own metadata to images. The exif data added by the camera is interesting but of little practical use to a photographer wanting to turn work over quickly and get it out to clients.
The fields we want to see clearly are Description, subject, author, copyright and keywords (tags).
At the moment adding data to these fields is far from easy. For a start on a hi-res screen (and what photographer would be using anything else?) the type is pitifully small and cannot be increased in size. Also the fact that when you type into the description field the typing just keeps on going in one continuous line makes editing a nightmare. (Try writing - and then editing - a description that contains the names and details of 15 people and you can see what I mean). Why can't the description field word-wrap?
An improved metadata panel would enhance Opus tremendously. It would make it the ideal solution for any photographer and at a highly competitive price. Where else for an affordable price could I gather my pictures, caption them and FTP them to clients in one application? I know if I was a millionaire I could buy Fotostation, or even wrestle with the nightmare that is Adobe Bridge, but in Opus I can have the lot for a very reasonable amount of cash.
I am not carping, guys, you are doing a really great job, but with some tweaks in could be that much more a practical proposition for photographers.
We'll probably make the font configurable but I am confused at the description of it as small. It uses the system font size, which scales with DPI and should be the same size as in any standard Windows dialog (e.g. right-click the taskbar, choose Properties).
I can understand wanting the font to be larger than normal, but I don't understand why it is considered small, unless something is happening on some systems which we are not seeing on our own? (And we run a mixture of 200% and 100% DPI machines, so we should see font size issues if they are there.)
The font size of the metadata panel is definitely not scaling with the DPI on my sytem which has a Dell 4k monitor running at 3840 by 2160 (the recommended resolution).
I am running with the Windows 10 scaling set at 150 per cent (again the recommended level) and have adjusted the fonts in Opus to 11pt Segoe for comfortable viewing.
If I increase that scaling (say to 200 per cent) , of course, the size of the fonts increases in all but the metadata panel. That remains stubbornly stuck at what I estimate is around 7pt.
If I individual change the font sizes in windows 10 (say Menu type size to 20pt, it is reflected in Opus as are all the rest of the available changes - Title Bar etc.
The situation is so bad that - if you see my post elsewhere - I have been trying to learn some VB scripting to construct my own metadata panel that I can read.
Perhaps I am missing a trick somewhere. It would not be the first time.
The Opus 12 public beta is the first version with DPI support throughout the program (and the version mentioned in the thread subject, so I assumed we were talking about it).
Could you post a screenshot showing a lister with the metadata panel open, and a Notepad window next to it so we can see the relative font sizes? Maybe something will stand out to explain what is happening.
Notepad uses a large, bold font for the main text editor part, but its menu uses a standard system font, and as you can see (although the fonts are not the same typeface) it is exactly the same size as the font in the metadata panel:
(Made from your screenshot image.)
If that looks small, then a lot of other things in Windows are also going to look small.
Just wanted to confirm nothing was going wrong really; it seems to be working as it should.
We'll be adding configurable fonts for the metadata panel so you can make it larger (or smaller) than the system font size in the future, if you so desire.
Thanks for looking at this,Leo. I do find the Metadata panel font very hard to cope with for some reason, though the rest of Opus the way I have the font sizes set is just fine.
It would be great if the Preferences allowed us to make the font bigger, after all, almost everything else is configurable in Opus
