INTERACT FORUM

More => Old Versions => Media Center 11 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: RobOK on August 08, 2006, 09:37:58 am

Title: Easiest way to Rate a bunch of Images/thumbnails?
Post by: RobOK on August 08, 2006, 09:37:58 am
I want to do a lot of image rating by looking at the thumbnails and quickly marking them using the standard rating field.

Approach 1:  Build a View Scheme that selects only Unrated images and includes a panel for Rating.  The problem with this approach is because I select only Unrated, the numbers 1 thru 5 do not show up in the panel for me to do Quick Tagging.

Approach 2:  In the thumbnail view, add Rating as part of the caption.  Problem, the caption is read only.  It does not show the empty five stars that I would be able to quickly click on.

I think I am missing something basic.  What is the best way to Rate images when looking at a bunch of Image Thumbnails?

Thanks!
Title: Re: Easiest way to Rate a bunch of Images/thumbnails?
Post by: RobOK on August 08, 2006, 10:00:49 am
As a workaround, i am using Approach 1, but not filtering out the already rated images in the view scheme.  Then, I moved Rating to the first panel position and to do the Tagging, I select the"?" for untagged (but since there are a variety of ratings in the mix of files, 1-5 show up in the panel and allow Quick Tagging).

I do think there are easier ways to Tag images with Ratings though, any ideas?
Title: Re: Easiest way to Rate a bunch of Images/thumbnails?
Post by: RobOK on August 10, 2006, 01:24:06 pm
Does anyone want to describe their view schemes they use for tagging images with a Rating and for putting Images into albums?

I'm looking for some new ideas!
Title: Re: Easiest way to Rate a bunch of Images/thumbnails?
Post by: marko on August 10, 2006, 02:49:56 pm
:)
evening Rob. Good to you still thrashing your images through MC.

I left rating to the fine tuning stage, which has yet to start in earnest, so I've not worked out a smooth workflow for it. For me, fine tuning hopefully means adding a rating here, grouping into album there, fixing a red-eye now, performing a crop then... time will tell.

When it comes to picture taking, I'm not what you'd call inventive. I feel the vast majority of my snaps don't really fit into groups that can be given [album] names, so I went the other way. I'm not a big fan of 'unassigned' in my panes, and it's also inconceivable that every file can contain a tag for everything, so, here's what I did:

(http://www.theganghut.co.uk/pics/ia/picpanest.jpg) (http://www.theganghut.co.uk/pics/ia/picpanes.jpg)
(click image to view full size)

For the most part, I used this viewscheme with the tree hidden, and for my mass tagging project, it worked well when coupled with some creative thumbnail text.
The theory goes that every single picture must have at least a [subject] tag. Using several expressions in the thumbnail text made it extremely informative:
(http://www.theganghut.co.uk/pics/ia/picpanes2.jpg)
In this 'workshop' viewscheme, both of these images are listed, and the text quickly explains which one will be available in the main library views (the 'top image'). An image is deemed 'tagged' when it's been given a [subject].

The thumbnail text contains a fair few rules that involve those elusive stacks and version sets I've been working on, the bottom line might be interesting however, as it displays the date and the tagged status of the image. It also contains an experimental "Christmas Day '05" thing I threw in there on a whim, and might expand to include other landmark annual events. It goes like so:

if(isequal([date],25//12//,8),Christmas Day 'formatdate([date,0],yy),formatdate([date,0],dd MMMM yyyy)) - if(isempty([subject]),not tagged,tagged)

try viewing a Christmas day picture with it and see what you think.

So, back to tagging...

To begin with, I used the [keywords] field heavily, but felt I was possibly making things hard for myself later on, so I created new fields for [animals] and [pets]. I didn't do [plants]. I left those in [keywords] thinking there wouldn't be that many of them. I was wrong, and so will be creating a [plants] field and moving the info from keywords to there instead.

Now that every image has at least a subject tag, it's possible to build a caption to use in the 'slideshow playback' settings that will always show something informative. I posted about that over here ---> http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=27043.msg236241#msg236241

I've started building viewschemes to use these new tags. For myself, I feel that I now have many ways to quickly find 'that photo of Vada with that silly hat on' etc. so I turn my attention primarily towards making it as easy as possible for total novices to find interesting sets of photos they would like to see via the theatre view interface. This is pretty new territory for me, but my first impressions are that the less panes there are, the easier theatre view is to navigate, so I've been building schemes for each major sub-set, still a work in progress, but something along these lines:
(http://www.theganghut.co.uk/pics/ia/picpanes3.jpg)

I really skimmed over all that, is there enough there to make some sense? I hope so.
I forgot to mention the source field that you see in the viewscheme. I made that to break the massive tagging job into manageable chunks. For it to work, I used kingsparta's 'replace master' plugin to unify all the filenames. All the sources are identified by the first three letters in their filenames. I did all of that before doing anything else and is just an extra step I made to help keep me organised. It's not essential, but I did find it very useful.

-marko.




Title: Re: Easiest way to Rate a bunch of Images/thumbnails?
Post by: Doof on August 10, 2006, 03:33:41 pm
How about if I made a modification to the Captionater, so that you could have an image displayed, and have a 5-star rating control beneath it. Then you rate the picture, and it automatically moves on to the next picture?
Title: Re: Easiest way to Rate a bunch of Images/thumbnails?
Post by: RobOK on August 10, 2006, 04:19:10 pm
THAT WOULD BE THE GREATEST!!!  (should be built into MC)

I was just going to post that really I needed to be able to slide show and be able to rate the number of stars at the same time.

I have to admit, I have only just recently downloaded The Captionator 3K, so I will have to experiment some.

But what you described is exactly what I need!
Title: Re: Easiest way to Rate a bunch of Images/thumbnails?
Post by: Doof on August 10, 2006, 04:24:31 pm
Ok, I'll get to work on it. Don't expect anything until after the weekend, though. I've got a camping trip this weekend and much to do to get ready for it.
Title: Re: Easiest way to Rate a bunch of Images/thumbnails?
Post by: marko on August 10, 2006, 04:28:06 pm
heehee...
nice one Doof m8.
end of September come early? ;)

any chance of slipping that default playlist setting in there while you're at it?
Title: Re: Easiest way to Rate a bunch of Images/thumbnails?
Post by: Doof on August 10, 2006, 06:45:51 pm
Just threw it together really quick before dinner... I didn't even update the build number... :P

it mostly seems to work, although that annoying thing where MC sometimes freaks out about writing the tags is still there... one of these days I have to bug the guys to help me figure that one out.

I also added the last playlist thing... it's not even an option, it just does it.

Oh, and I got rid of that annoying beep when you hit enter in the text box.

Give it a download and let me know what you think. It's a bit of a mess right now... mainly because I think that once I really sit down to it again, I'm going to start from scratch. :P


http://www.dooftoo.com