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Author Topic: Category Matching Setting and MC20  (Read 2626 times)

glynor

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Category Matching Setting and MC20
« on: July 29, 2014, 12:02:20 am »

I'd like a new Matching option for Categories (or some kind of other mode, though I think it makes sense there), so that you can have a Pane that shows all current values for that field in the Library which match the Files to Show search for the View (regardless of what other Panes are selected).  Kind of a way to make the Pane "separate from" the rest of the Panes.

Also, can someone explain to me what the two Matching settings in there now do currently?  We have Match All and Match Any.  They do different things, I know, though I'm not entirely clear on the logic.  I do know that neither does what I want now.

To give a real world example, I hit this when tagging (or trying to tag) photos all the time:

I have a View for my Photos with panes like this:



Sometimes I just like to browse them by date and whatnot, and look through them.  But here's the problem.  If I click on 2014 in the Year pane, the Keywords and Ratings panes are filtered to show only those results which have already been tagged for some file which also matches 2014.  So, if I've never given a photo a 5 star rating yet, the 5 vanishes from the Ratings pane.  That's why, my screenshot above, even though all files are essentially unfiltered, doesn't have a 1.  I guess I've never tagged a photo a 1-star.

That's typically convenient.  It is exactly what I want the Month and Week panes to do.  But, in many cases, especially those where I have a predefined list of "allowed" or "common" values, or where I'm using it primarily for tagging, I want the list for particular Panes to stay and always show all results (filtered only by the Files to Show search, not other Panes).

So for Keywords and Rating, in this case, I want it to show all of the values (well, those valid for Photos).  Often the Value I want to tag the file with is right there in the list, but when I browse down to select the files I want to tag, then the choice I want in the righter-most panes vanishes, and I have to type it in by hand.

This happens in music tagging a lot too.  I have a "predefined set" of Genres and some special Keywords used as flags for things.  But if I'm trying to add the "Hide from All Views" Keyword to a new set of files, and I browse to them via any of the other Panes (like Location or whatever), since they don't have the Keyword I want to add, they all become empty and I have to type it.  The auto-fill gets it, but that's fiddly and a lot slower than just checking the little box in the Panes.

You can kind-of fix this by turning off Filter in Both Directions.  But then you're stuck making the Panes in question go further to the Left in the set of Panes, or else they still get filtered.

But that is often inconvenient for using the View, since it would force you to "promote" a perhaps rarely used field (or one full of some good, and mostly useless data, like my Keywords field) to the Left-Hand side of the set of Panes.  I like having it filter in both directions.  I just want to be able to turn it off for particular Panes, which should always be unfiltered by and independent of the others.

Make sense?
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marko

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Re: Category Matching Setting and MC20
« Reply #1 on: July 29, 2014, 12:36:56 am »

Makes sense to me.

My current method of fitting my workflow around this is to import photos to an  incoming folder that MC watches.

I then created a view to tag photos with. "Files to show" lists all images that are photos. For me, this is most of them, so, any image where [Type] is empty.
I created a custom library field to group the list by. It uses the premise that once tagged, the files are moved out of the incoming folder. So, if they're not in there, ie. most of them, they're grouped all together at the bottom, in a group called "Tagged", while the rest, the incoming ones, are grouped above that. I've tried various ways to group the incoming files, and think that by file path works best. Each shoot gets its own folder in "Incoming".

Now, as I select incoming files for tagging, all existing photograph keywords are available to choose from, as long as I dont filter the file list.

A DMZ pane could certainly smooth a lot of that out.

-marko
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