The early upgrade discount is tempting, but for what? I bought MC 24 (and every prior year for many), hoping to finally get improvements to MC's Photos / Images capabilities. After all, MC's splash screen shouts "PHOTOS" louder than anything else -- it is dead-center in the splash graphic, the only media logo in bright colors. Seems like a promise that MC does great things with Photos. So, I'm hoping MC24 dives as deep into Photos as it already does to Music and Video.
Because I have used MC "forever", upgraded every year, my music library design and use was locked down years ago, still wonderful, the reason I recommend MC to fellow broadcasters. I'm not aware of anything more I need in the audio area (until MC can directly feed Chromecast Audio, and directly feed Alexa).
Re MC video, while I'm sure it is wonderful too, I have found no use for it, not my thing. And live TV recording is not possible in my areas of California, too many mountains for over-the-air reception.
That leaves MC Photos / Images as the weak spot. Improving it would be a huge reason to upgrade, and probably for non-MC customers to buy it -- only some people want to deeply manage audio or video, but *everyone* has ever-growing photo collections.
My current big job, which will go on and on, is to scan and catalog my extended family's decades and decades of photos. I have more than 60,000 photos so far. Checking with family and friends who are constantly shooting pictures with their "phones", that's not even a large number. To organize all these images, MC is my tool of choice.
But there are many ways MC's Photos aspects could be improved, as discussed by many users over the years. I'm hoping to hear that better ways to organize, tag, and view Images will be a big focus of MC 24. Help users be smart about metadata, by supporting standard tags that can be read/written by other imaging apps, and ditch the proprietary tags that are evolutionary dead ends (or even better, have them write to standard tags such as Keywords, using the prefix "trick" that some of us have adopted). Add some standard views optimized for Photos. Provide a better photo Preview mode, perhaps a floating window that shows the currently-selected image. Improve the image editing tools. Improve the slide show, and especially provide a robust screen saver slide show -- the features of abscreensavers.com, especially the ability to superimpose metadata (Captions ! ) controlled by CSS, is an excellent example. These are just top-of-head ideas, reviewing forum discussions of the past 10 or more years will yield more strong suggestions.
Since Photos have their own needs, a starting point could be to give MC a Photos Only Mode just like it has an Audio Only Mode. This would greatly simplify MC for users who want to manage Photos and not also do Audio/Video things. Hide the many many menu options and actions that do not apply to Photos. And perhaps add/expose Photos-specific functionality.
Also, I'd love to use MC for PDF management, it "just" needs better PDF preview/viewing and standard tagging. I include PDF as a Photos feature because in my world, most PDFs are containers for scanned images. The document scan button on many printers/scanners stashes the resulting images in PDFs. As with photos, most people have ever-expanding piles of PDFs that MC could help tame.
Author
Topic: [REQUEST] Photos / Images Management Improvement (Read 7165 times)