I have to admit, I am on the verge of giving up using MC to organize images. With my gigantic 20mb Canon RAW images, If I hover over any image it hangs MC while a pop up overlay is being built. If I am scrolling the list and pause for a milisecond too long, MC locks up while the pop up thumbnail gets built. It makes tagging extremely frustrating.
Stacking features started off well but haven't been touched since.
Viewing RAW photos across library server is also currently unsupported.
Currently, for uploading images to flickr I first have to choose my images in MC, copy them somwhere, then edit them in photoshop camera raw, export the edited pics out as jpegs, have MC auto import the new jpegs, and then finally stack the jpegs with the original raw files. This feels convoluted.
If MC did the following things, it would save me a lot of work:
1. Auto-stack as a part of auto import. (You could use the same rules as you do with stacks now. Ie. Auto stack files of the same name, putting the jpegs at the top of the stack)
2. Build all RAW cache files as part of the auto import process, just like the way normal thumbnails and audio info are processed, in background threads.
3. Serve RAW cache files over Library server and DLNA.
4. Put stack tools in the action window. Improve the stack gui (file selection borders, background colors, thumbnail stack icons, etc)
5. use the same xmp tagging method that adobe uses for raw files. Build thumbnails based on the exposure and color values in these xmp files.
Doing these things would at least make MC usable for me again. If however, you did the additional following things, organizing photos would become almost painless:
a. Ability to create and apply "Tag schemes" to batches of images. (Ie. Set the values of a bunch of categories and save that as a preset.) I repetitively tag the same bunch of files with the same information. It would be easier if I could apply a bunch of commonly used values and then just refine the images that are different, rather than tagging each photo from scratch each time.
b. Alternatively, implement confishy's "Autotagger" so that we can set MC to auto tag images based on which folder we have put them in.
c. add better curve, levels, white balance tools so that we dont need to go outside of MC.
d. Auto tag people using face recognition.