So, as you are no-doubt aware, if you use the fancy new Library Server system and connect all of your machines via it, the one major thing you lose is access to the Send-To Menu, Locate on Disk (external), and similar Drag-Drop operations. This makes sense if you are accessing the server from "away" (such as via the Internet) and don't have direct access to the files in question. However, if you have the network drives all mounted and you are on a LAN, then this doesn't make anywhere near as much sense.
This was formerly a problem with simply playing video files until we got the "Play Local File if one Matches" option. That option solved the playback buffering problems for video files, but it doesn't help with the other features of MC you miss out on. Now that I've been living with the system for a while, I find that I use these features a LOT in "everyday life", and not having them on my systems at home has become a major problem. For example...
Today my wife is going through and tagging a bunch of photos that we then want to share with some friends. In the past, she would have just tagged them all with appropriate keywords so that they were easy to filter, and then selected them and sent them to Flickr, or maybe drag-dropped them to a new folder on the desktop for zipping and posting to Dropbox. This is no longer possible unless she does the work on the Library Server machine itself.
I also use MC to manage many of the image assets for my website. I used to be able to easily drag-drop directly from MC into Filezilla to upload them to my website via FTP. I can't do this anymore unless, again, I'm using the Library Server machine.
I constantly use the Send To menu to send image files to Photoshop and other similar tools when organizing and editing pictures. This doesn't work anymore from the machines were I'd typically do the work.
Even simple things like finding files on disk are made clunky and much more challenging... This morning I was trying to help my wife get set up for her tagging operation, and I needed to actually go and find one of the files in the file system. Before I could have simply used Locate -> On Disk (external). That doesn't work anymore, so I was forced to look at the path, then navigate there myself in Windows Explorer and dig to find the one file I needed in a folder with 600 pictures.
Now, my library server system is not a headless box in a closet, but it is one of many machines down in my "man cave" workspace in the basement. It is certainly not appropriate or comfortable for family-friendly use (and frankly, I don't want my wife down there poking at all my stuff all the time). But it would be a lot worse if I was trying to use it from a headless rack-mounted server, which is a setup I was considering for the office!
This is really a pretty major limitation of using the Library Server system, and I'm strongly considering going back to my "old way" of using the system. I really don't want to do this. A lot of the other benefits of using the Library Server system are wonderful, but it does force you to lose access to a TON of the benefits of using MC as a file organization system along with other applications.
Making everything worse, none of these functions actually generate error messages that explain anything that my wife could understand. The drag-drop just silently fails. The other ones pop up an error that the file doesn't exist, but lists a weird URL path that doesn't appear normal to a "regular human" user. Not very user-friendly, for sure.
So....
What I think needs to be changed is the same thing that was done with video playback with the Play Local File option. If a matching file is available and this option is enabled, then the Send To, Drag-Drop, Locate on Disk (external) and other similar functions should work. I realize this may just take time and some programing-fu, but as I decide whether to stick with my new Library Server setup, I'd like to know if this is "on the list" for sometime relatively soon, or if I'm just going to have to live with all the missing/broken functionality for quite some time to come.
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Topic: Clients & the Send-To Menu, Locate on Disk, and Drag-Drop (Read 950 times)