I've just got around to getting a digital camera (Canon A80 - very sweet) so I've been playing around with using MC for organising images and video from that (before I've been using it for audio management only).
I thought I'd give some feedback on how I got on, with a wishlist on how to improve the product in respect to image management.
Please note that this isn't a 'I need that and that do it now' list of requests - I think MC is awesome, and I've been really impressed with v9.1 for organising my music. I just thought it'd be useful to give you guys some feedback from someone who's just started playing around with image organising, and what I think would improve an already superb product.
The whole process of aquiring and managing the images in MC went pretty smoothly. The reason I got MC in the first place was the superb library features and the really powerful interface, and it generally worked great for images. I've also tried ACDsee, and to me it doesn't come close to the power you've got in MC. The panes works brilliantly, tagging's great, tagging mode is a god-send, and the smartlists are really useful. If you haven't worked it out yet - I'm the biggest MC fanboy :-)
There are 2 areas that I think would really improve doing image management (some of these may be mentioned before, or could be in v10 beta, if so let me know and I'll shut up):
Aquiring from the digital camera
This process felt a bit 'tacked on'. When it was getting the images from the digital camera, it popped up a message for every image it got ("Getting image 10%... 20%... 100%", window closes, another opens, "Getting image 10%..." etc). This would be fine for a few images, but I was getting about 300 photos from the camera. In the least, I think it needs one independant window for the whole process, with a counter going up ("Currently aquired X images and Y videos" or whatever). If it could get a count from the camera of all the images, we could get a nice progress bar as it goes.
Taking this further, it could show a preview of the last captured image. A really powerful system could allow you to preview an individual image before deciding if you wanted to download it; an option to only download images we don't already have; automatically putting them in a subfolder with the name of the date (I feature of ACDsee I really liked) etc.
Also, one bug I found: halfway through the aquisition of the images, my camera turned off (batteries dead). The program just stayed on "Getting image 20%". No message, no cancel button. I had to close MC from the taskbar and restart.
Interface
This is the first time I've had any gripes with the interface. The problem was because I was in thumbnail display for the first time. Now that the display 'columns' were hidden, there was no easy way to change the sorting. Also, because I've got properties as "Same as column in current view", it was hard to add a column to the view. Every time I wanted to change something, I had to go Display > As Details, make the changes, then back to Display > Thumbnails. When you're trying to set up the right interface there's a lot of trail and error (which properties you'll need to hand, sorting by the correct field) and it gets rather laborious. And setting up columns and panes by the process of 'right click > add column > advanced > scroll to property' for every column change when you're trying to set up 'the perfect view' is quite frustrating.
I think a new window allowing you to customize the view would be really useful. Select which panes to show and in which order, which columns to sort by, and which properties to have in columns in the details display, all on one window, would really help.
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Topic: Using MC for images management (Read 1003 times)