Usability Enhancements, little things to make PMView even more efficient Options

[Tannin]

Hi all. Most of us probably already know how efficient and time-effective PMView is. In my view, it's simply the best there is. But it could be even better. Here are some small changes that could make it even faster and easier to use PMView for productive work. In no particular order:

1: Cropping.
1a: Users often need to crop to a particular exact size. Currently to do this a tedious series of steps is required: (a) select an approximate area; (b) toggle view/show/selection info; © scroll the selection counters up and down - always getting the direction wrong at first because they are rather non-intuitive - or type in the required numbers to get the size you need (even in you move the selection to the extreme top left to save the mental addition required to calculate which coordinate will produce the desired final image size, you still have to remember to subtract 1 because the selection starts at 0 - i.e., type in 1024 and 768 and you get an image that is 1025 x 769!)

In short, where resizing to a particular image dimension in PMView is fast and easy, cropping to a particular dimension is tedious, error-prone, and slow. How difficult would it be to add a more efficient cropping method? There are probably about 6 good ways to do this, but here is one: add a crop-to-size item to the transform menu. (Is it really a transform? Technically, maybe not, but if it sits right below the "size" entry on the transform menu and works exactly the same way as transform/size, it would be easy for users to find it and learn how to use it.

The sequence would work like this: use the menus to select "transform/crop to size", then select the desired size (e.g., 800 x 600). This tells PMView to create a selection rectangle of that size and place it anywhere (top left is as good as any - PMView has no way of knowing yet where you want the selection made, only how big to make it). Use the mouse to position the selection rectangle as desired, then crop in the normal way.

(But why would a user want to do this instead of cropping to a rough size and then transforming to the exact size? Two good reasons: first, sometimes the aspect ratio of the image is important (especially when the image is one of several equal-size images on a single page layout). Second, where the size difference between the source image (or desired area of the source image) and the target image is small, resizing introduces unacceptable loss of image quality - you can resize from 2000px to 800px and with a little sharpening get an excelllent result, but if your source image is (e.g.) 930px, resizing it to 800px impacts on the final quality in a very visable way.)

1b: An option to grey-out the non-selected area (the part you are going to throw away when you crop the image) so that it is easier to see what the cropped image will look like - i.e., similar to the way Photoshop does it. This should be an option as there are advantages and disadvantages to both. Perhaps the best way to do this would be add a "grey-out/don't grey-out toggle" to the bottom of the right mouse pop-up menu whenever you have an area selected. But even if it were only switchable from the main view/preferences menu, the ability to grey out the area you are going to crop away, and thus see what your cropped image will look like would be an excellent addition.

[Tannin]

2. File formats.
Less is more! Most of us use only a handful of the many file formats PMView can read and write. In particular, how often do most users want to write a file in anything other than their three or four most-used formats? (Example: I mostly use TIFF or BMP for lossless intermediate saves while I'm working on an image with PMView, Photoshop and Neat Image, then JPG or PNG for the final images - practically never any of the others. I bet that most other users do much the same.) But every time you need to switch formats (e.g., save this particular image as a TIFF because you need to do something to it in Photoshop and you shouldn't use JPG for intermediate saves) you have to scroll through a great long list of possible image formats looking for the one you need. OK, it's only a few extra seconds, but seconds count - and the reason we all use PMView in the first place is because it is so fast and easy. Let's make it even faster and easier: add a way to take out the file formats we are not interested in and just show (e.g.) JPG, TIFF, and PNG. Naturally, this needs to be reversable so for that once-a-year time when you need to save an OS/2 icon or a Compuserve RLE you still can. (I thought of trying to hack the PMView executable to do this, but decided that was too hard! Would it be practicable to extract the save-as file format list to a text file that the advanced user could edit?)


3: Resize.
The transform/resize feature is one of PMView's great strengths. Fast,, simple, flexible. One of its best features is that it offers single-click selection of common formats (800 x 600, 1280 x 1024, for example) and yet still allows the user to type in any other size. But it too could be even better. Assume, for example, that the user wants to make screensavers or wallpaper and has a laptop with a 1400 x 1050 native resolution. Or that you are working on a website where the site-wide policy is to use illustrations that are 328px wide. (Good webmasters tend to insist on this sort of thing as it ends up producing a site that looks uniform and professional, and also allows much simpler HTML code.) If you do a lot of this sort of work - producing images to a particular format that doesn't happen to be exactly the same as one of the pre-set formats - you wind up doing a heap of typing in the same number, over and over and over. The solution (it seems to me) is to provide either two or three user-pre-set transform/size resolutions, or to have the existing "custom" resolution default to whatever the last custom resolution was - i.e., make it remember your last custom size transform.

But come to think of it, what if you are doing something where you are creating a set of images in two or three different custom sizes - e.g., where you are making 200px clickable thumbnails and 660px main images for a website? That's a pretty common sort of task, after all. Then the neat and simple second solution above still doesn't help. Answer: either a scrollable "history" window below the last pre-set resolution, or two or three extra buttons (in the same place) that contain the last custom resize resolutions.


4: File sorting.
Scenario: you have a large folder full of image files you need to sort through and categorise (typically, you want to delete some and just keep the best ones - photographers do this all the time, and it takes hours). So you flick through the images, deleting, moving, sorting stuff out. But after a few runs through, you start having difficulty making decisions: you've already seen these images and you've already deleted or moved the ones that stand out as obvious choices, so now you are doing the hard yards - sorting the images that you couldn't decide on right away. One thing that makes this harder still is that you keep seeing them in the same order each time. Always seeing the pictures in the same sequence makes it difficult to judge each one on its merits. If only you could mix them up, you would be able to see them afresh and make better decisions. But in PMView, the only way to do this is with a slideshow - and with a slideshow you can't delete or move things! Adding functions to the slideshows would work, but an easier and neater way to achieve the same or greater benefit would be to add a sort by: random to the FOC. (You can already sort by name, extension, image size, and 6 other criteria, none of which help a great deal for this task - a random sort would help a great deal.)

[asavage]

2. File formats.
Less is more! Most of us use only a handful of the many file formats PMView can read and write. In particular, how often do most users want to write a file in anything other than their three or four most-used formats? (Example: I mostly use TIFF or BMP for lossless intermediate saves while I'm working on an image with PMView, Photoshop and Neat Image, then JPG or PNG for the final images - practically never any of the others. . . . Let's make it even faster and easier: add a way to take out the file formats we are not interested in and just show (e.g.) JPG, TIFF, and PNG. Naturally, this needs to be reversable so for that once-a-year time when you need to save an OS/2 icon or a Compuserve RLE you still can.

I thought this a terrific idea when I first read it, and I still think it is.

I, like many others, switch SaveAs formats frequently. Typically, between JPEG & PNG. I do this often enough that I know to press 'P' eight times to select PNG.

Sure would be nice to have some way to have the last selection float to the top of the list, or a user-select section for the top three or four we use.

Not a bug, nor a high-priority, but yes this is something I've wished could be improved.