Hey
Great to see its an area you are working on. I tried the image preview and while its a nice first step, just taking up another column of space on my screen isn't making it too useful on my laptop or fit on my screen that much.
The GUI needs to be more flexible so I could put the tree on auto hide for instance so that I can get back some more screen real estate to make it more useable.
What I am really encouraged by is the use of overlay icons to bring up the preview window.
These are a huge usability feature I find and REALLY help make the app more user friendly and faster to work with. The more this is used, the faster and easier the app will be for me at the least, to use.
Additional overlay items on each image that I would find a HUGE benefit for working with images would be:
* rotate icons so I could one click at the spot my mouse was already at, to rotate the image
* stars under my pictures so I can easily, inline rate them
* ability to click the date (if I choose to show it) under the images and inline edit it.
Also, just an idea - but the popup image preview that comes as we hover over images, it'd be cool if this could be set to be the preview so that when we click the preview icon, this pops up but then make this popup a little more powerful so it has tools next to it for: rotate, resize, edit, set rating, etc.
Another thought, 'share to web' is set as a main tool in the menu system which is great. When I share to web though I always want to share it to facebook and not to an MC album.
It'd be great if we could configure the action the 'share to web' triggers so that it could be permanently set to share to facebook for me and then for whatever else other users want.