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[darichman]

Other discussion threads:
   Discussion: Interface, Views & Tagging (http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=45758.0)
   Discussion: Photo Handling (http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=45759.0)
   Discussion: Classical Music (http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=45824.0)

I've been busy this lazy Easter Sunday afternoon... another long post! This is a long read, and contains excerpts from old posts. Wanted to organise some ideas and put them all in one place

MC has come a long way in image organisation - panes, Pix01, facebook integration and nested panes are great drawcards, and more recently stacks have made image organisation even more powerful. This is an area of huge growth and, while MC grew from a humble music program, has now set itself up to take advantage of what will become a very important market.

I have a library dedicated entirely to photos (+ home videos) and many of my friends and family members were impressed by what MC could do and were quite eager to find out what program I was using - not because of it’s great music and video management, but because of what you can do with photos. Many purchased the software. Most of these people have little knowledge of computers and digital media and were surprised to learn what could be done.

There are two audiences here: The casual photo enthusiast who simply wants to plug their camera in view their photos in a simple calendar and album setup. And the tech-savvy organisational enthusiast with knowledge of EXIF, photo editing and geotagging. J River needs to cater for both.

This is a thread to organise ideas about how MC handles photos.
   - What do you like about MC image handling?
   - What do you think needs improving?
   - What areas do you think will be important?

[darichman]

A COMPARISON OF MC AND PICASA
I use both Picasa and MC for my images, and photoshop for editing.

Picasa is a good target for MC to strive for... it is simple to use, has seamless integration with its own online gallery and has enough power to handle most types of image libraries. It also has competent and useful image editing features which are seamlessly integrated into the program - try it, it works a charm.

So why do I use Picasa?

MC wins over Picasa hands down for organisation. If I want to find a photo by person, place, or any other field, MC is the way to go. I like having a million fields and use panes to organise images in every conceivable way possible But a lot of people don't have massive libraries and wouldn't even think to tag "People" in their photos. These people form the bulk of the market, and use Picasa (or iPhoto) for the following reasons
    - it has a sleek interface (scrolling has a 'bouncy' feel, all the controls you need to "do things" with your images are at your fingertips - there is no need for nutting down through "Library tools" etc etc)
    - it has gimmicky features (like timeline, slideshow, posters and collage): it's things like this which draw in a lot of amateur users - it impressed me when I checked out the website for the first time
    - it has more powerful features like geotagging and integration with google earth/maps (this is an area of growth - cameras capable of geotagging will become more and more popular - "Place" is becoming almost as important as timestamping in photos
    - integration with Google's Picasa Web Galleries is simple and easy to use. The program knows which photos you have uploaded to your online gallery and allows you to edit and add to your online albums.

In my honest opinion, one of MC's original strength is now becoming one of its major weaknesses - MC was marketed as "the one which plays them all". This is a great concept - a single and familiar interface can be used to navigate all your audio, video and image collection. But as media organisation has become more specialised, I think MC has suffered because of this original strength. In my mind, MC still tops the bar in audio. But there are other pure video and audio programs that outdo MC, because that's all they deal with. MC will win out in organisation -- the two areas where this may not be the case are playback and manipulation

In both Picasa and MC, there are no options on the screen during passive slideshow playback. Just the image (+/- caption if enabled). This is good.

In picasa, when I move the mouse, an elegant little overlay comes up with basic image commands:

Click to enlarge.

In MC during image playback, when I move the mouse, the MC interface pops up (this takes up a fair chunk of the screen)... the whole image is resized and it just ends up looking a little messy... [Edit: This has been changed now]

Click to enlarge.

[darichman]

PLAYBACK
Ultimately, all our organisation of photos is done with playback in mind. There are two situations when we want to play back files, and each has different requirements for good playback. There may be compromise which suits both purposes

1. Reviewing files for tagging, editing or organisational purposes
The main difference here compared to audio and video is that we usually need to be viewing the image while we are tagging or editing a photo, so we need to take this into account when we consider photo tagging. For an image with six or seven people, I don't like having to open the image in full screen (which starts a slideshow) close it and try to remember which seven people were in it as I enter into the tag AW. Larger thumbnails may make this easier, but I'm not quite convinced yet. This overlaps with “manipulation” below, so the points will be covered down there.

2. Leisure: Sitting round with family watching a slideshow of images
The only real interaction here needs to be "forward" and "previous", maybe with some background music. MC does this competently at the moment, but it would be nice if slideshows were “sleeked” up a bit. See the comparison with Picasa as to how this should be done.

MC currently has a single playback option for all media (audio, images and video). The interface is exactly the same as for audio and video playback. We even still have the "progress bar" for playback. I think image playback could benefit from a few context-sensitive "image-specific options" available on mouse movement. Options like "rotate", "edit" and "tag" would be really useful. Have a look at the Picasa images above

Captions
   - One final small change to playback I would like to see regards image sizing with captions.
   - Currently, the caption covers the bottom part of the photo. Not a big deal with single line captions, but the minute you use two or more, a fair portion of the image is obscured.
   - If we specify to use captions in image playback settings, please allow us to resize the image according to the caption size, not cover up the image with the caption.

Or alternatively, have more configurability over the caption - opacity, size, font and position.
I'd really like a smaller opaque multi line caption overlay in the bottom left with info like album, year, place and people

[darichman]

MANIPULATION
Interface
 As mentioned above, we usually need to be viewing an image while we are tagging or editing a photo. I would like to see a separate image handling mode with all the possible edits and manipulations on the screen with a large image of the photo. No right clicks, just single clicks on a visual icon or tab to do what I want. Have a look at the way picasa does this:


Click to enlarge.

What do we see here:
-A big fat view for our photo
-A small "slideshow" reticule with thumbnails of the next 3 and previous 3 photos (top middle)
-A snazzy "zoom window" which shows where I am in the photo as a whole (bottom right)
-Thumbnails of the most recent few photos I've been working on (bottom left)
-Quick links to "slideshow mode" (see above) and the library (top left)
-Quick links to web album, email, print etc (bottom)
-A little caption bar under the photo (I like this )
-Basic "rotate", "star" commands (MC could put it's [Rating] stars in here)

And most importantly, the edits on the left.
-Basic Fixes (Crop, Straighten, Red Eye, Contrast, Colour),
-Tuning (Lights and Shadows)
-Effects (B&W, Sepia etc etc). This is all I expect from a simple image editor. Anything more and I will use photoshop.

MC would naturally need a "Tagging" tab as well
In this I would like to be able to specify the fields I'd like to show
...and for list entries, have an option to "show all list entries" or "show list entries in this album only" option (this latter one makes tagging people and places a breeze once you have a few photos filled out properly in an album)

Edits should be as "lossless" as possible, and retain all tag info.
Stacks could take advantage of this.

EXIF support
   - We can read EXIF tags now. This is great, but a fully featured image program should allow us to view the EXIF data (separate from the database "tags"), edit it and save it to the file. While it is good to have a single "Tag Window" for all media types... sometimes I'm not sure if what I'm viewing is from the EXIF tag or MJ tag (without opening up the "Format" field)
   - Advanced functions like "Batch EXIF date changing" would be nice (eg adding 2 hours to a bunch of photos to correct for time differences)

"Features"
Let's face it, people like cool new things. Slideshows, timelines, collages etc are great for impressing the amateur user.
   - The ability to frame "Faces" in facebook was a huge factor in the networking site's success. This is discussed further below. Does it bother anyone else that you can tag 5 people in a photo, but there is no way to know which person is which?
   - The ability to select multiple photos and autocreate a collage or timeline would be a nice feature
   - This is getting a bit fancy, but video collages are very popular... pick some music, pick some photos and select a few simple transitions and you're done.

Batch Features
   - I would find a "batch convert png to jpeg" feature INCREDIBLY useful. Some people pay for software just to do this (myself included). I should be able to select my conversion settings, size etc. MC audio conversion is fully featured, why shouldn't images get the same treatment?
   - Advanced functions like "Batch EXIF date changing" would be nice (eg adding 2 hours to a bunch of photos to correct for time differences)

Editing
Do yourself a favour, download Picasa and double click on an image. A very simple and user friendly menu comes up with Basic Fixes (Crop, Straighten, Red Eye, Contrast, Colour), Tuning (Lights and Shadows) and Effects (B&W, Sepia etc etc). This is all I expect from a simple image editor. Anything more and I will use photoshop.
--The key is integration. Don't use a separate editor I have to open up. And make sure that my output file retains all the tag information when I save it!!
--I love the lossless image rotation in MC. Simple lossless editing will make the program more functional and stop users from turning to other image solutions.

[darichman]

ACCESSIBILITY
Web Integration
Pix01: I like Pix01. With a bit of love and care it could be something great... there are a few things missing though which always lead me back to Picasa Web Galleries.
   - I think we should be aiming for more integration here. MC should know which photos I've uploaded to my web gallery and I should be able to add to or change photos without replacing the whole album. I know this is hard, but it is important.
   - A bit more customisability to the site itself: allow me to organise my albums (by date, by name, with categories etc etc) and reorder my photos, and allow me to view the tags of the files (ala Picasa)
   - Promote community – this not only helps pix01, but is free advertising for MC as well. Have an option to share private galleries with other users, and add the ability to comment on photos (ala Picasa)
   - Allow me to "Download Entire Album" (ala Picasa)

Facebook: iPhoto has this sorted - copy them!! In iPhoto you can fill in all the tags from the program and better yet, fill in the "Face" frames before you upload. With the power of it's numerous fields, MC is in a prime position to mirror this or beat it. I want to be able to bring up the photo, bring up the "frame" and select the name from my [People] field. There are open source solutions for this so it's definitely not impossible to do this. Check out: http://code.google.com/p/fb-photo-uploader/ (it's under GNU General Public License)

Picasa: Why not? Complete support for the major web galleries would please everyone

Face Tagging!
It seems a lot of photo programs are starting to do this... better get in there J River! Allow us to tag individual faces using a frame/portrait and save the info to the [People] tag (or a separate tag and have it relate to the people tag). Would be great to be able to tag faces using the information already in the people tag... click on the name and then click on the face in the photo. The current people tag says who's in the photo, but there's way to tell who's who.

Geotagging and Map Integration
   - The idea of viewing a "Map" of your photos is very appealing.
   - Picasa is the only program I'm aware of that supports this well - it is well integrated with Google Earth and Google Maps.
   - Ideally, I’d love to see MC hook in with Google Earth and be able to see a virtual map of my photos

[Mr ChriZ]

A COMPARISON OF MC AND PICASA

In MC during image playback, when I move the mouse, the MC interface pops up (this takes up a fair chunk of the screen)... the whole image is resized and it just ends up looking a little messy...

Click to enlarge.

Totally with you on the messy front here. 

[Griff]

MC should know which photos I've uploaded to my web gallery and I should be able to add to or change photos without replacing the whole album.

I agree.

[cncb]

I also would like to use MC exclusively now for image organization.  They have recently added pretty much everything I use in Adobe Photoshop Elements which is what I currently use.  One thing MC needs for me, though, is a toolbar of some kind or a way to add additional items to the action window.  I have no problems using an external editor but there should be an easy way to fire it up instead of going 3 levels deep in the right-click menu.  Also, I hope some improvements can be made with stacks (being able to auto-stack my stacked photos from PSE with their naming convention and easily being able to expand/contract stacks by clicking on the stack thumbnail icon in particular).  Another thing that would be useful is a way to preview and select/unselect images from my camera before acquiring/importing them.

[KingSparta]

One Thing That May Help Is MC Be A Bit Smarter On What Is Selected.

What I Mean Is If Only Images Are Selected Than Pull The 3 Level Or So Options To The Top Level Menu.

I really Don't think That Media Centers Image Editing Is Is Up to Par With Media Center It's Self.

[darichman]

From: http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=43896

Picasa now offers you the ability to match your photos to a specific location using Google Earth. The "Geotag" feature allows you to embed location information within your photo file as well as display your photo on a satellite map rendered by Google Earth. To Geotag a photo, please follow these steps:

1. Select your photo in Picasa
2. Select "Geotag with Google Earth" from the "Tools"> "Geotag" menu to launch Google Earth. A small Picasa window will appear in Earth's lower-right corner displaying thumbnails of the pictures you selected.
3. Use the arrows to advance through multiple pictures. If "place taken" information has already been entered in Picasa's folder description, Earth will automatically go to the specified locale. Otherwise, you can navigate to the location using the yellow cross-hairs which appear in Earth.
4. Find the location you want, and press the "Geotag" button.
5. When all of your pictures are tagged, press the "Done" button to add the information to Earth's "My Picasa Pictures" collection. You can also use the "Geotag All" button to tag all of the selected pictures with the same location information.

Picasa will write the longitude, and latitude to the photo's EXIF GPS metadata. For example, if you look at the "Image Properties" in Picasa you will see something like: GPS Latitude 34 1'13.04"N. Picasa will display a small cross-hair icon on the thumbnail of a photo that has been Geotagged.

Any chance of J River doing something like this?
...if it's just a matter of sending the photos to Google Earth and then writing the coordinates...

[pank2002]

First of all, great post. I hope some devs will respond to this thread.
MC is a great photo editor, but there are definitely room for improvements. As said, some of the things would be easy to `fix'.

Pix01: [...]
   - I think we should be aiming for more integration here. MC should know which photos I've uploaded to my web gallery and I should be able to add to or change photos without replacing the whole album. I know this is hard, but it is important.
[\quote]
It should be better. For every web album there should be a playlist or similar in MC. When I add a song to my web-gallery playlist the image should upload automatically.
If I delete a picture from the playlist, it should be removed from pix01.

Picasa: Why not? Complete support for the major web galleries would please everyone

Not a big deal for me. What does picasa allow that Pix01 does not? If Pix01 want to get really popular it should preserve EXIF tags (I do not know if it does) and allow the viewer to download original (non-resized) picture.

   - The idea of viewing a "Map" of your photos is very appealing.
   - Ideally, I’d love to see MC hook in with Google Earth and be able to see a virtual map of my photos

That would be kind of funny. I am not sure how it works in picasa, but ideally, I would like to be able to write the address, and MC should get the address from Google maps or a similar service. In Thunderbird you can do this (It might be a Lightning (Calendar) feature, actually)

Cheers,
Rasmus

[darichman]

If Pix01 want to get really popular it should preserve EXIF tags (I do not know if it does) and allow the viewer to download original (non-resized) picture.

This would be a dream come true... but who pays for the bandwidth?
If some big improvements were made, I'd consider paying for membership or something, but I'm not sure how many others would...

[robydago]

This would be a dream come true... but who pays for the bandwidth?
If some big improvements were made, I'd consider paying for membership or something, but I'm not sure how many others would...

I'd pay for unlimited storage!

Also, I was never able to use Pix01 and I had to use Picasa because of Pix01 very low photos per gallery limit (60 if I remember correctly).

[pank2002]

This would be a dream come true... but who pays for the bandwidth?
If some big improvements were made, I'd consider paying for membership or something, but I'm not sure how many others would...

When JRiver decided to make their own site, rather than integrating MC with Flickr or similar, it became JRiver's hassle to pay for this. My old Sony Imagestation allowed this, but I paid a little bit for it too.
I would not mind paying a bit extra for Pix01, although I do think it would have been smarter to integrated with photo sites such as Flickr or SmugMug (even better).
-Rasmus

[Jaguu]

I am also support the opinion that MC12 should improve in  the area of image presentation, especially the two areas
a. slideshow configurability b. caption configurability

(see also:http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=45547.0)

And from the Beta Forum:

Just showed some slideshows from my artworks collection to a few friends of mine. The slideshow was set up with intervalls between 8-15 seconds.

Although they liked the paintings, they complained about the poor and flickering presentation of the slideshow. They found the hip-hopping of the images, when the caption text appears and disappears very irritating. The whole slideshow made to them a very nervous impression. They found the appearing and disappearing of the caption text and the adjusting of the images to its presence or absence made the slideshow almost imbearable to watch, especially when playing quiet music from Bach in the background. They also found that the black background with blueish, glittering boarder was not suiting to the artworks presented. And, with more and more wide screens available and most images in a more rectangular format, it would be much nicer to have caption information on the left or right side of an image rather than below the image.

As I already mentioned several times, MC12 is great to manage images, but rather poor with the way you can run slideshows. Remember, media management is only one part of the medal, media presentation is the other part of the medal. It is excellent with music and video, but rather simplistic with images. In my opinion this part of MC12 would need a major brush-up, such as:

a. Select font, font size, font color, background color (including transparent), border shape and border color of the caption display during a slideshow. There should be much more flexibility on how tag information is presented on screen.
b. Arbitrary positioning of the caption information: top/bottom of screen, left/center/right side of screen.
c. Selection of display length of caption information depending on total display interval (0% to 100%)
d. Display of caption information and images in separate windows, side by side or as overlay without continuously adjusting the image size.
e. Possibility of displaying more than one image per screen (from 1 to 9 images, side by side, or even overlapping or as collations)
f. more sophisticated and configurable transitions
g. possibility of creating personal slideshow templates similar to track info displays, could even be combined with visualizations
h. possibility of making slideshows distributable as already discussed in the MC12 forum.

[darichman]

That would be kind of funny. I am not sure how it works in picasa, but ideally, I would like to be able to write the address, and MC should get the address from Google maps or a similar service. In Thunderbird you can do this (It might be a Lightning (Calendar) feature, actually)

I was thinking something along the lines of this maybe?

[Mitch Sowden]

Well be Global (1)!!  Secondly MC = Organisation - I think this is the value add and mainstream focus for MC, lastly (3) do you really want to take on major players in this space eg Adobe (both Light room & Photoshop)  as well as many others

I've faithfully upgraded version after version but could do with Media Jukebox in reality. (Would love to add video and soon will budget / hardware allowing but reality is not yet) I would love to be skilled at using MC as my only media centre but my real life demands are more than what would allow me to "play" with new untested SW. I always deselect video and image settings but hell the library function is powerfull! I'll use Lightroom for most Photo handling which is 99% all I need (What a great program - I only use max 2% of it's functionality) and Photoshop for that one in a million photo I can't simply take again. Well that's duffus's view. I encourage the MC development team to focus on their core strength which in my very humble opinion is libary / file handling for the masses - how do I organise these countless snap shots / MP3 vs APE, Doc maybe vs PDF I dunno. What makes me go wow is when I can do something with a data set (by myself with maybe help from forum) that I would normally view as to difficult or too expensive to ask for. Cheers, Mitch

[MrHaugen]

In MC during image playback, when I move the mouse, the MC interface pops up (this takes up a fair chunk of the screen)... the whole image is resized and it just ends up looking a little messy...

Imo this is the biggest problem with MC when viewing pictures, and watching movies etc. The resizing have to go away.
The same thing goes for browsing web pages in full screen. It's just alot of trouble when you move the mouse and the screen is resized.

[ThoBar]

Imo this is the biggest problem with MC when viewing pictures, and watching movies etc. The resizing have to go away.
The same thing goes for browsing web pages in full screen. It's just alot of trouble when you move the mouse and the screen is resized.

Agreed. A personal gripe of mine also.

[rossp]

Agree also, worst aspect of MC movie playing.

Ross

[DarkPenguin]

I would not mind paying a bit extra for Pix01, although I do think it would have been smarter to integrated with photo sites such as Flickr or SmugMug (even better).
-Rasmus

I didn't care for Flickr's terms.  Haven't looked at smugmug.  Might do Zenfolio at some time in the future.  (Guess what I use?)

[darichman]

Just to clarify my position, I would MUCH rather see MC do these things by itself than integrating with Flickr or the others...
If it came to a  choice, I'd rather see resources dedicated to improving pix01, face tagging and geotagging in MC than trying to secure deals with other web galleries.

I didn't care for Flickr's terms.  Haven't looked at smugmug.  Might do Zenfolio at some time in the future.  (Guess what I use?)

Photo albums?

[pank2002]

Just to clarify my position, I would MUCH rather see MC do these things by itself than integrating with Flickr or the others...
If it came to a  choice, I'd rather see resources dedicated to improving pix01, face tagging and geotagging in MC than trying to secure deals with other web galleries.

I agree. Pix01 has great potential, it just need a bit more work. My top-wish would be to be able to manage galleries from within MC, as described above.
-Rasmus

[cncb]

I think what darichman describes in manipulation is sorely needed.  There needs to be a shortcut to put the image in "full view" mode (zoomed to take up the entire thumnbnail area so that you are dealing with one photo at a time).  At the very least when you use the thumbnail slider it needs to maintain your selection visible in the view (right now it just zooms in somewhat arbitrarily and it is difficult to find the photo you are interested in by scrolling through one image at a time). 

[Doof]

I have to say I agree 100% with darichman. I used MC exclusively for a while until I read about Geotagging. So I downloaded Google Earth and Picassa and started tagging. I really don't like Picassa's idea of organization. There's really only two options that I could see... Leave them in their folders or create an album, which from what I can tell is just like an MC playlist. But just that little experience with Picassa showed me a lot of areas where MC is lacking when it comes to photos. It just really boils down to MC's insistence on treating pictures the same way it treats music and relying on the same interface. On the surface it seems like a swell idea, but once you see what's possible after shedding that paradigm, there's really no comparison.

Don't get me wrong... when it comes to organization, MC wins hands down. But there's so much ground to cover when it comes to images, and right now MC's lacking. I almost think it's time for JRiver to change priorities a bit. I think the music side of MC is done. Yes, I'm sure there's more that people would like to see, but I really think that music should take a back seat to pictures for a while. Maybe devote MC13 to pictures and focus on conquering the photo arena the way it already has conquered the music arena.

[pank2002]

Doof,
I think you are right. The music interface is incredible. With grouping I have gotten all I ever wanted (since v9 or 10 )
The next big thing is photo handling and hopefully improved document handling. At least in my opinion.

V12 is an old horse. I bought the license over a year ago!

[darichman]

I think the music side of MC is done. Yes, I'm sure there's more that people would like to see, but I really think that music should take a back seat to pictures for a while. Maybe devote MC13 to pictures and focus on conquering the photo arena the way it already has conquered the music arena.

I've wanted to say that for at least a few months and maybe more, but didn't due to fear of controversy or public stoning

The only real major change I'd like to see for audio (and also video as well) is a true relational database  (eg artist or movie metadata, art etc) but apart from that, if MC left audio behind for a bit I wouldn't complain

[Doof]

The only real major change I'd like to see for audio (and also video as well) is a true relational database  (eg artist or movie metadata, art etc) but apart from that, if MC left audio behind for a bit I wouldn't complain

That's something that could benefit images as well, though.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there should be zero development on the audio front. I'd still like to see improvements in Radio mode, for instance. But just take the ratio of time devoted to audio and images and reverse it.