using MC to preview images is still really awkward, and to be honest, I'm not sure what the answer is.
I think it was yourself park, that started a thread a while ago that resulted with general opinion being that we set up a separate "image playback zone" in order to get a decent preview.
I stuck with that for a while, but seriously, for me, it's far from an ideal solution, and when I need a quick preview, I still use "Right click > send to (external) > AcdSee"
Once that's open, I can scroll through the images in that folder with the mouse wheel before going back to MC. I long for the day I can ditch that "Send to.." command!!!
Back in October last year, I found something similar to your request somewhere else:
I installed a trial copy of yet another image manager program the other day and so far, I've not done a whole lot with it....
I was poking around in it this morning, clicking this, clicking that, you know, like you do, then I paused, wondering what to do next, and got pleasantly surprised by what came next. I'd left the mouse resting on one of the thumbnails....
Now, if MC were to have something like that, I reckon I'd be happy(er)
I'd expect the MC version to allow me control over how big the preview would be. I think that popping up like a tooltip is probably not the best idea, but I'm sure JRiver could come up with a workable system.
I think that previewing images for tagging with MC is one of the toughest things to achieve (easily) with MC, bearing in mind that invariably, there will be music playing at the same time.
Sending them to a different zone is all well and good, but then we don't have panes for tagging and are bound to the AW, which gets tiresome quite quickly.
While we're on the subject of image tagging, am I the only one that would be overjoyed to receive a "tag painter" like Lightroom and Picture It have?
You know, you attach the tag to the cursor, then just click on each image in turn to apply the tag.
Another option I've thought that might work would be if the maximum thumbnail size set by the slider would cause the selected/first image to fill the entire list pane (maintaining aspect ratio). The image being shown would always be the "selected" image, and the mouse wheel could then be used to advance through the list. I like this idea. I've thought about it a fair bit and I can only see positives, no negatives, but of course, I don't need to write the code do I
-marko.