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[pank2002]

I would too use MC for photos if there was better photo handling. As pointed out by others calender view and a zoom slider would be excellent additions. I've tried Adobe Photoshop Album (isn't that what it's called) and though I think it didn't catch me.
  Currently I use the irfanview thumbnail browser and explorer. My pictures are in folders like "date_month_year" but I can place my pictures like that with MC too. I think MC should open the selected image in a bigger format when activated -- I would maybe be better if it opened in a new window rather than in the main window.
  Maybe you could use that crazy dB view you made at some point that enlarged album art when hovered in image-view, so that the selected picture is slightly enlarged.
  The camera handling isn't too good either. As it work now it thinks that my Canon PS s45 always is connect (it always to be found under devices.) That is quite annoying, so I use Downloader Pro consistently.
  Also, would it be possible to use MC for uploading to more advance sites? Specificly I would like to be able to upload to Sony Imagestation with MC.
-Rasmus

[glynor]

There's been an image editor in MC11 for about 6 months.

Right click on image, and choose Image/Edit Image.

I realize that there is one (I remember when it was introduced).  My point was that that isn't the direction I see needing improvement.  The editor is a waste of time as far as I'm concerned, because I doubt that it could ever have the power I need (if Adobe can't do a stripped down editor that's worthwhile for me, then I'm reasonably sure that MC's isn't going to cut it).  Of course, I do that professionally, so I'm not always the one to judge by in this case...

Photoshop Elements 3 ... for editing obviously it is great but it seems slow and bloated for organising

Absolutely.  And conveniently enough, this is MC's strength (and I do love it and use it for my photo organizing - I just hope for a little more).

Location is one of the options for camera acquisition.  However, I usually copy to the same temp folder, delete the ones I don't want, tag the rest, then right click on the images, and choose LibraryTools/Rename Files from Properties.

And this is exactly how I do use MC.

What I would specifically like to see for camera importing is more progress feedback, previews of the images in camera, and better reliability.  It may be better with recent builds, but in older builds of MC11 I had problems with it skipping files, crashing altogether, and not removing images from the camera (when it was told to).

Oh, and since you brought it up, some user-customizable "Presets" (similar to the presets in Customize View) for the Rename Files from Properties -- which will recall both the file name setup and the directory path (including base path).  I don't filename my videos the same as my pictures and neither are the same as my music.  In fact, some of my videos I don't name the same (TV Shows verses Movies verses my Video clips).

In MC it is Right-click > Send To > External. I have configured Photoshop, ImageReady and ACDSee there.

Yes.  This is a great feature.  I use it.  I just want a toolbar button so the access can be quicker!

[glynor]

I would too use MC for photos if there was better photo handling. As pointed out by others calender view and a zoom slider would be excellent additions.

The zoom slider would definately be nice (and I wouldn't rather have the buttons I mentioned, I just meant I would live with the buttons over nothing).  The calendar view ... Eh!  I could live without it.  I just have a View Scheme set up that does essentially the same thing with the tree, and I like that.

Photoshop Elements 3's Timeline view is pretty cool, but I don't know how you'd implement that into a multi-purpose application like MC.

I've tried Adobe Photoshop Album (isn't that what it's called) and though I think it didn't catch me.

Photoshop Album is an older (though not really that old) Adobe product.  It used to be that they had a product (called Album) that focused on organization, and a separate product called Elements which was a stripped down Photoshop (hence the "elements" of Photoshop).  They have now combined the two with Photoshop Elements 3 which includes the organization features of Album (which still can't hold a candle to MC though they do have the cool timeline thing) and the image editing of Elements 2 (though drastically improved).

[RobOK]

Jim, and others,

I spent more time with Picassa and MC side by side with a large photo collection (5000 images) and have a couple of observations.

1) picassa just looks a lot better.  It looks like a more modern application.  The photo area has a light grey background and all of the thumbnails are displayed with a drop shadow.  This makes it look much more modern.  MC *feels* 3-4 years old on the user interface, even though the underlying program may be much newer.   Maybe that can be addressed by a skin, but by default MC seems much "darker".  Lots of black backgrounds.   If someone can recommend a good skin for me that would be great, but I think the base MC product should be cleaned up and freshened (my .02).

2) speed, speed, speed.  When I select a folder (album, sub category) in MC, I get a screen full of MC icons and one by one the images fill in.  If I hit page down rapidly, I get another page full of icons, or if I go really far down, the whole thing slows down and i have to wait for it to "catch up".   Picassa on the other hand is built for speed.  Interestingly, Picassa has NO icon for a missing picture waiting to load.  That concept does not exist.  It seems to me all of the photos are loaded into memory at once.  I don't know how, but they seem to be dealing with them as graphical representations, where MC is dealing with them as files to go read or create thumbnails.  When you change the size of thumbnails, you can do so smoothly.  The pcitures all change at once, but... and maybe this is a clue for you.... they are all out of focus.  It takes a while for the screen to "sharpen" the thumbnails, but that is almost imperceptible to me.   I can scroll up and down the whole page of photos, and yes Picassa keeps them all out at all times, and there is not delay .... all the pictures are just there.  Every time I click to navigate within images in MC, I have to wait.  It may be 1/2 second or at most 3/4 but it is a wait long enough that i notice at every step.  (4.3 ghz, 1 GB memory -- not an underpowered machine).  Okay, enough on that.

3) Picassa has a slower import.  Maybe it is doing something on the front end to make all this speed possible, buidling a set of thumbnails?  I dont mind the up front time, especially since it shows me progress quickly flashing each photo as its imported in a tiny status window.  I see it and it feels like it is moving fast so I am happy with the import even though it takes longer. 



Hope this helps make MC a better product!

Cheers!

[JimH]

Thanks for the feedback.  It sounds like Picassa may be doing the thumbnailing on import.  You can force MC to thumbnail everything in the options section (under view, I think).  After that, speeds should be much faster.

[RobOK]

Well if nothing else I have learned a lot from this thread!!

EDIT:  The thumbnailing is going through every entry in the database not just the images.  Is it building a thumbnail for every mp3 too?  Where does it store them?   If I then change the thumbnail size, does the thumbnail have to be re-created?  This does NOT seem to be how Picassa is working with thumbnails, the thumbnails appear to be available in a variety of sizes almost instantaneously.  Could be using some video effects to do scaling (like video games do), rather than recreating Thumbnails of different sizes?

Okay, 14,000 thumbnails and 17 minutes later, its done!  I would agree that it is faster, but still not the Picassa behavior.  When I go down a screen full, the images fill in left to right , top to bottom.  I no longer have the MC image missing icon, so that is an improvement, but I can still see the screen visibly get painted.  In Picassa, its like the whole screen is pre-rendered in a video buffer and the scrolling just smoothly slides that page up and down.  No redrawing is visible, so it appears much faster (perception is reality).

Jim, one small thing, when you are in Image "mode" and you click on Library Browser, the library browser overrides and goes into Audio list.  Is this by design to always go into a music listing?  Do you intend the Library Browser to be used for photos too?  If so, it should go into Images when you are in Image mode.

I'm sure between picassa and MC i now have a million thumbnails!

[thomaspf]

Here is a few ideas on what I would like to see in the next version.

Right now I am experimenting with this using external DirectX plugins but I am having some problems.

After looking into digital room correction and buying the gear to actually measure speaker response in a real environment I came to realize that after the speakers itself the biggest impact on the sound comes from the room interaction. In order to provide anything close to a balanced sound without investing in aspecially treated audio room you need some form of room correction. Getting this right with the myriad of free or comercial tools out there is a very tricky job.

I would love to see a room correction module in Media center that does software only first order correction. This could be as simply as a parametric equalizer that automatically smoothes out the sound up to 400Hz only but the sky is the limit. There are obvious problems like integrating a calibrated microphone etc.

Once you have a microhpone this I have another suggestion for differentiation. I listen to music and movies at levels that I hope will preserve my hearing ~72db average. At those levels Fletcher-Munson is kicking in heavily and I am compensating for this with a three band dynamic compressor. Putting a good loundness corrected volume control into MC would be a real treat.

But even simple things like a delay control for the speaker would be great for people that can't set up a perfect listening triangle.

Cheers

    Thomas

[JustinChase]

I'm not sure how the last post applies to the image discussion of this thread, but i would like some more discussion on how image handling can be improved in MC.  there were some really good ideas in this thread, and I'm glad it got resurrected.

I use thumbs plus most of the time for manipulating and reviewing files.  i like the way thumbs handles images.  It takes a while to build them, but then handles them quite quickly.  If you mouse over a thumb, you get a blow up of that image (sort of like the tooltips for music).  You can set it to open a fullscreen (sans toolbars) view of an image on d-click.  You can also set the number of windows it will open.  I use this to open all of the images I've taken of the same subject, but with different settings (f-stop, iso, composition, etc)  I can then alt-tab between the fullscreen windows and secide which ones I want to keep and delete the others.  This is how I pair down my images.

I would actually prefer it MC would let me do this same type of thing with the images side by side (on a widescreen laptop).

I like that I can tell thumbs to watch folders and auto import.

The image manipulation tools are really where thumbs beats MC.  Yeah, you can edit images with MC, but it's very limited.

Hopefully with the new addition of (can't remember his name) who implemented the raw image import for MC, some big improvements will be made on this front.

I would suggest just using thumbs for a few hours to get the feel of how it works.  Some of the benefits/features I can't remember to explain, but it just feels better.

With all of that being said, MC is WAY better at the organization aspect, which is also quite important.

that's all for now.

Bring on v12!