Maybe something for MC13, but I've been thinking recently about the way I browse.
Although I've spent a long time carefully tagging all my movies, and want to be able to use as many groupings as possible to filter my files, I'm finding that having lots of panes makes general browsing in tiles view and theater view really hard. A typical browsing viewscheme for me consists of
about 6 panes with "Filter in both directions" on. I only really use [Type], [Genre], and [Album] for most browsing, but I use [Country], [Keywords], and [Rating] often enough for it to warrant making panes for them.
I consider these latter 3 panes more of "Secondary" panes, hence putting them furthermost right. That way I can filter with my most useful three panes and just select something from the files list below.
The problem is, that when I am in Theater view or tiles view and i get to the [Album] level, I can keep on entering the next 3 panes which aren't really very useful at that point.
If you're still reading, thanks.
Anyway, here comes the suggestion.
How about
combining all of your secondary type panes into one! In this mockup, a pane contains a series of grouping buttons, that when clicked upon, launch an overlay tickbox list. When you tick one, that list entry could be placed underneath the button to show you how the list is being filtered, with a little "x" to the right of it, to clear that selection. At the top of the pane, you could have a "Reset pane" list entry.
I think that these "Pickers" inside a pane are similar to using the search bar at the top of the program, but better because they would always be there in front of you and need less clicks to quickly make selections.
The way I figure, they would only be useful when "Filter in both directions" is on, or if they act globally to filter/overide all the normal panes.
I guess that this pane could also be ignored by tiles and theater view, thus making a very simple viewscheme when browsing that way.
The images I linked to:
A typical Viewscheme
One pane with pickers