[Shotwell] photo sorter ideas

[Ingo Lütkebohle]

Hi,

I do not know whether you guys already have ideas for a photo sorter,
but for me this is one the most important tasks when coming back from a
shoot and I have a few ideas that I just wanted to throw out for some
feedback.

My basic view is that sorting photos when coming back from a shoot is a
task that is distinctly different from everyday work with my library.
Most importantly, import time is when I delete the photos that are
obvious rejects. I do this both for space economy and to reduce the
large number of photos that are not keepers.

To do this, I usually first look at photo in high resolution, as many
technical defects are often not visible otherwise -- for example, slight
shake is usually not visibly from thumbnails. I do this first because
(unwanted) technical defects are a fairly uncontroversial reason for
throwing out an image, whereas choices based on other factors are often
be harder to make.

Also, I often compare several shots of the same object, to pick the best
one(s).

Last, but not least, I check for "pop-outs" and the reverse, i.e. which
of the photos strike me as good and not. I can usually do this fairly
quickly, but Shotwell's current way of asking for confirmation after
every delete is really cumbersome and something else, which is still
safe, would be great (see below for an idea).

Sorting is an incremental task -- I go through photos one at a time,
cull those that are immediate rejects, go back and forth between
alternatives and mark those that could pass or not.

Having explained this, my suggestions are two things:

1) Provide a "sort view" which displays a batch of photos (for example,
one event) in full resolution. Provide keyboard shortcuts or icons that
sort photos into three categories: a) obvious keepers, b) obvious
rejects, c) maybes. For maximum efficiency, no questions should be asked
and after a selection has been made, the sorter should advance to the
next image, but provide an "undo" shortcut that goes back one image and
undoes the selection for that one.

After completion, the obvious rejects should be removed at once and the
object keepers kept. The "maybes" may warrant a further iteration or
could also be kept, at the user's discretion.

2) Provide a comparison view which displays a batch of photos of the
same object. This could either be based on user-selection or based on
image & time similarity (I don't know whether its possible here, but in
video processing, often very simple things such as the euclidean
distance can already provide usable frame differencing. This can often
be done on vastly reduced scale images, for faster comparison, at almost
no cost in discriminatory power).

A general comparison view is difficult. Many things could be the object
of comparison. One use case could be that several photos are ok but one
of them has better exposure. A bunch of histograms, shown all together
with their respective photos at thumbnail size, could help with the
decision in this case.

If high resolution is needed to compare, one could get multiple high
resolution views by selecting a region of interest, with the same region
being shown from each image, in high resolution.


Well, I hope you can use some of those ideas, at least generally ;-) Let
me know if you need more detail. I'm also interested what others think
of this?!

Best Regards,
Ingo