May 15, 2012
[This post is part our ongoing series introducing Photosmith 2 which will be a free update for all users]
Yesterday we showed you the Grid and an overview of the new UI. Today we’re going to focus on a few of the biggest productivity boosters in Photosmith: Smart Groups, the Tagging sidebar and the QuickTag drawer.
QuickTag Bar
One more tip about the QuickTag bar. If you have mutlple photos selected and their colors and/or star ratings don’t agree you can see that visually indicated by hollow filled buttons. If you tap one of the color or star buttons it will apply that setting to all the photos and if you don’t, obviously none of your previous settings will be changed.
If you drag the QuickTag bar upwards you will see the QuickTag drawer.
From left-to-right across the drawer are:
- Filter – Tapping the check next to the button globally enables/disables filters. Tapping the button itself slides up a new drawer with buttons to tap on/off any filters you want. The filters are just additive since tapping is so easy on the iPad – no reason for complicated greater than/less than formulas.
- Sort – Tapping this slides up a new drawer with a button to reverse the sort order and then selections for Capture Date (when the photo was taken), Import Date (when it was copied to the iPad), Star Rating, or Color Label.
- Smart Groups slider – sliding to the left (or tapping the icon) increases the number of groups which makes each group more specific. Sliding right (or tapping the icon) decreases the number of groups. More on Smart Groups below
- Mass select buttons – Select all of the visible photos (subject to your current collection & filter settings) or none of them or invert the buttons. The iPad Photos app lacks these and I weep for them every time I have to delete a batch of photos.
- Selected Photo Count – this always shows you the number of photos that are selected in the current collection. Any time you tap a QuickTag button or apply a metadata change in Grid view, this is the number of photos that will be affected.
Smart Groups
We first introduced Smart Groups back in January. In that post we discussed several ways you could use it based on capture date where Smart Groups automatically figures out how your photos should be grouped based on the time they were taken. However, it’s also useful for import date, star ratings, or color labels.
If you sort by import date Smart Groups will group by the batches that you imported. As a bonus, just by adjusting the slider you can change the groups to nearly any multiple or factorial of your typical workflow. For example, if you typically import once a day the default setting will probably give you exactly what you are looking for (it’ll vary somewhat depending on how many files you have). If it doesn’t, a quick tweak will get you there. However, if you turn down the grouping level you will get groups by week or month instead. If you happened to import more than once a day, turning the level up will give you those groups separated too. It’s like Events collections but without all the work or inflexibility. What happens with events if you shoot a wedding that lasts past midnight? It’s a mess… Smart Groups figures that out for you.
Another great case for Smart Groups is sorting by star ratings. With groups turned off (furthest right setting) you get everything in a single group sorted by star rating. Increasing the grouping breaks them into Rated/Not rated. Increasing again gives you High/Medium/Low/None. and finally, you get each star rating in it’s own group. This can make those 2nd or 3rd passes through your photos really easy. Or, imagine your workflow is to star everything you like and leave the “duds” unrated. When you’re done sort by stars, set the grouping level accordingly and then tap the group header to select/deselect as desired and tap color/star/reject as desired. In about 4 taps you just accomplished what would have taken more taps and a bunch of fiddly scrolling around and dragging selection boxes in Lightroom.
The same logic works with color labels but since color labels don’t have an intrinsic rank or sequence the groupings there are all, something/nothing, or individual values.
Tagging sidebar
On the bottom left you can see that the Tagging sidebar is selected. The Tagging sidebar is your one-stop shop for all text metadata you can edit on photos. Any changes made here will be instantly applied to all of the selected photos(1).
If you have multiple photos selected but they aren’t entirely consistent with the values set you’ll see “< X values >” instead clueing you in to the differences. If you choose to set this field the changes will be applied to all, if not, they’ll be untouched.
Metadata Presets
Tapping the “New Preset” button allows you to create a new metadata preset(2). You can set any of the fields(3) with an explicit value, leave it blank AND checked to clear it out, or leave it unchecked to leave the fields untouched.
Once you have the preset how you want it select some photos and open the preset by tapping on it and tap the “Apple to X photos” button. Of course, you can create multiple presets and apply them in sequence or use them for different purposes. Whatever makes the most sense for your workflow.
As we count down the final days to release (we’re just waiting on a few necessary approvals now) we’ll be posting more of these walk-throughs. Hopefully, we’ll have an honest set-in-stone date to report to you very soon. (And that date will be very soon too).
Footnotes:
- In Grid view changes are applied to all selected photos. In Loupe & Fullscreen mode changes are only applied to the currently visible photo. (We tested several different “rules” for this and this is only one that makes sense.)
- Metadata presets do not sync with Lightroom because Lightroom’s plugin API does not support it. If/when Adobe adds that ability we will add support for it as well. In the meantime, you’ll have to manually manage your presets.
- Excluding keywords. Due to the fact that keywords can be partially selected (or not) merging changes globally could get really confusing. For now, we’ve opted for simplicity and obviousness. If you folks find this to be lacking we can research further to find a way to make this work for the roughly 10,000 variations that might occur.
Posted in: Design | 8 Comments
I leave for Paris tomorrow, until sunday. So I hope I’ll be able to use photosmith 2 during my trip
Is there an UNDO function for tags? Because it seems to be so easy to mass edit photos, there also a great risk of accidentally overriding lots of tags.
Also is there a way to jump to a selected photos in grid view? E.g. if I select 12 out of a 2000, and then realize that I should have selected a different one for number 3, do I have to manually find the position of that selected photo in the 2000 or is there a way to “jump” to your previous/next selection?
We prompt for confirmation before performing any destructive action that applies to many photos. We plan to add full undo support in the future but the path to do so is unclear. Shake-to-undo is a standard iOS gesture but even Apple acknowledges that most user’s aren’t aware of it by including an explicit undo buttons in all of the iWork iPad apps. That’s a remarkable admission in itself. It’s a sign that system-wide “undo” isn’t fully baked yet.
The Grid does offer a quick scroll index by group, that’s about as close as you’re going to get. Another approach is to just switch over to the “Selected Photos” collection and remove them there.
Hi guys! Those screenshots look badass!!! Man I can’t wait to put my hands on it !!! Congrats guys your work is very appreciated !! The best of the luck for you with your v2 creation!! Because just think about this, not even adobe has than such a thing for lightroom or any of their software where you can make use of the ipad and incorporated in the workflow with images at their full res. and for me you’re the David vs the Goliath, I’m so proud of you!!!
Looks great so far. Had a question about keywording. I have a large keyword list that I already use within Lightroom. Will I be able to use the same keyword hierarchy with Photosmith?
Yes, you can change the setting in the plugin to sync your keywords every time (slower) or just on command (faster). There’s even a separate menu option under plugin extras to only sync your keywords.
One word of warning, depending on what you call a “large keyword list” (we consider that > 5000 keywords) the soon to ship version is a little slow to display the list when searching and such. That should be fixed it in the next update–it just didn’t make it in time for the first release.
So can you load presets onto Photosmith and then export them back into Lightroom?
Unfortunately, no. The Lightroom plugin API doesn’t contain the calls required to sync presets. You can create & edit presets on Photosmith or Lightroom but they don’t sync in any way. If/when Lightroom adds the required APIs we’ll add support too.