May 12, 2012
[This post is part our ongoing series introducing Photosmith 2 which will be a free update for all users]
In preparing the press stuff for launch we realized that most people have never seen what version 2 looks like unless you bought Jeff’s book. We’ve talked about it a great deal and offered a few glimpses but we’ve never shown full screenshots. Well that’s all going to change right now.
Here’s Grid view:
View Mode
Starting in the top-left corner are the view mode buttons, they provide direct access to the 3 ways to view your photos. You can also get to Loupe by double-tapping a photo.
Sidebar
Just below the view mode buttons and anchored to the left side of the screen is the Sidebar. At the bottom of the sidebar are tabs for Library, Tagging, Services, and Dashboard. Here’s a quick overview of them now but we’ll detail them further in future blog posts.
- Library is the list of all your collections, both the Photosmith built-in ones and any you’ve created or synced. iPad Photos app’s albums are not displayed because apps aren’t allowed to edit them(1).
- Tagging is where all of your metadata is edited. If you’re familiar with version 1 this is the sidebar you see in Loupe view. Now it’s available all of the time. If you have more than one photo selected it shows you the aggregated values for each field. This makes it pretty quick and easy to find anything that’s out-of-sync (like missing location assignment, etc.)
- Services is your import/export hub. You can change the settings for importing iPad photos or Eye-Fi. Configure Lightroom sync (both directions) or, export to Flickr, Facebook, and Email.
- Dashboard is maintenance headquarters. Purge old data, check for suspect photos, re-run the setup wizard, access the in-app help (wifi or data connection required), or contact us with ideas or request support.
The biggest change you’ll notice when using the app isn’t immediately obvious in a screenshot. It’s that the sidebar mode is no longer tied to the view mode. You can look at collections in Loupe or edit the metadata in Grid, etc., whatever works for you. Photosmith 2 is all about being flexible to allow you to work the way you want to.
QuickTag Bar
Across the bottom of the screen is the QuickTag bar. This gives you instant one tap access to rotate, color labels, star ratings, and reject(2) your photos. If you are in Grid this will apply to all of the photos you have selected in the current collection. In Loupe & Fullscreen it applies ony to the currently visible photo. The QuickTag bar has a few more tricks up it’s sleeve but we’ll save those for another day.
Content Area
The large area just above the QuickTag bar is where your lovely photos show up. We’ve kept everything else on screen quiet and as sized down so that your photos get as much attention as possible.
This shot is showing Grid and you probably noticed right away that the grid is broken up into rows, that’s our Smart Groups at work. We’ll describe them in more detail tomorrow but trust us, it makes sorting through a large batch of photos nearly effortless. You really have to try it yourself to believe it.
Each section has a header with a group select/deselect button on the left and the data range of the photos in the section. Two cool features we really love here is that the resolution of the time reported matches the range of the photos. For example: If your group has photos spanning only a few minutes you’ll see hours, minutes, and seconds too. If they span years there’s much less detail to distract you. The second cool thing is that you can Smart Group on any of the fields we sort on: Import Date, Capture Date, Stars, and Colors. The groups and headers update to match. This makes progressively narrowing down a set of photos really easy.
On the far right of the Grid is a quick index slider to make it quick and easy to jump to any group you want.
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:
- Third party apps are allowed to create new Photos.app albums but they can only be edited during the same app “session.” Once you close the app and come back they are read-only. Albums created by other apps are always read-only. For this reason, we treat them exclusively as one-way export-only destinations.
- As of Lightroom 4.0 there is no plugin API to set the Reject flag so therefore it doesn’t sync directly. Instead, we don’t transfer it via our own Sync but if the file already exists (like if you did a cable sync) then we set the copy name field to “Rejected” so that you can easily find them with a Smart Collection. We believe Adobe is going to add the necessary APIs to a near-future version.
Posted in: Design | 22 Comments
March 19, 2012
We’re updating our icon starting with v2. We were never really thrilled with the original icon, but were under self-induced pressure to deliver, and then just never updated it since.
We wanted the new icon to be… oh hell- here it is:
A lot (most?) of the photo apps out there use a camera or a Poloriod-type image for their icon. We wanted to be different. And since “Photosmith” is a play on the goldsmith / blacksmith concept, we chose something that was representative of that. And after dozens of iterations on the concept itself, we liked the pure and simple anvil in the end – both for it’s simplicity and what it represents.
A big big thanks goes out to our designer, Nico Janssen, for taking the lead on this and driving it through multiple different artists and vendors to completion. It was no small task!
Posted in: Current Progress, Design, Marketing | 9 Comments
February 21, 2012
[Nico Janssen is our "new" designer (he's actually been onboard since July 2011) and is responsible for all of the incredible beauty that is Photosmith 2. He also produced the video on our homepage and has been an all-around incredible asset to the project, we are very fortunate to have him.]
January 2012.
It’s nine o’clock in the evening, and I’m chasing the sunset westward across the Atlantic. My plane is losing the battle, so I leave my window seat and wander the low-ceilinged aisles to prevent statistically improbable embolisms, and also to sneakily scope out some empty seats I might prefer.
“What are you doing this weekend?” they asked innocently, two days ago. We Skyped over breakfast — well, my breakfast, their dinner — and now I’m on my way to the United States for the third time in my life. I feel like such a jet-setter! I feel lik Andy Warhol, when Napoleon shuttled him to Atlantis to celebrate his marriage to Boudica. I don’t know what to expect.
‘They,’ by the way, are Chris Horne and Chris Morse, the developers of Photosmith, and I am Nico Janssen.
Born in Amsterdam to a feisty lass from Belfast and an educated rocker from Jakarta, I now live on the world’s largest man-made island, three meters below sea-level. Last time I was in the States, a girl asked whether we all scuba-dive to work. This time, I’m flying out to Atlanta in my capacity as the designer of Photosmith 2.
It took a bit of work to land the job — trawling the Photosmith support forums, shooting a spec promo video, and dropping hints with all the subtlety of Thor’s hammer — and I like it a lot. I like how it fills out that weird gap in my calendar between my dull day job and sleep. I like the team, too. The Three Musketeers we are, with myself as a cunning Aramis to two d’Artagnans both called Chris.
Photosmith has been a fascinating challenge. To bring full-fledged photo management to the iPad, a companion to Adobe Lightroom, is no mean feat. So much control needs to be placed at your fingertips on a sub-megapixel screen. “It should be effortless and delightful,” they briefed me, “and incredibly powerful. Here are three billion user scenarios that need to be supported. Go forth.”
That was months ago, and the work since then has been staggering. I designed transforming buttons, virtual drawers, intelligent sliders, swipe-enabled carousels of controls… Complex custom interfaces designed, coded and discarded in favor of something better. We plotted out a wish-list roadmap to ensure the interface could support future functionality.
Hundreds of radical iterations of mockups, all built pixel-perfect in Adobe Fireworks at my own masochistic insistence. Wireframes and sketches can convey an idea, but they can’t tell you how a screen will feel. On a touch device, feeling is everything.
Just last month they approved the new Polaroid-style thumbnail grid I proposed. We’re close, very close.
When I disembark the Chrises will shuttle me to a hotel, where I’ll be chained to a laptop for the weekend under armed guard. I’m excited to meet them, and even more excited at the prospect of finalizing the last outstanding screens. Well, I say “finalize”… Experience has taught us that Interface and Structure interact at every level. No concept, no matter how logical and obvious, is guaranteed to stand up to the rigors of pixel-perfect simulation. I’ll no doubt head home with more tasks on my punch list than we’ve scheduled for this weekend, but that’s fine with me.
I find a new seat where I can stretch my legs a bit, and settle down.
I blink, and the weekend’s over.
It’s three fitful days later and I’m on a (full) plane heading home, passing through the Atlantic time-vortex in reverse. In the overhead locker, my MacBook is quietly cooling down from its exertions. Shell-shocked and shivering, poor little thing. A talkative boy on the seat beside me informs me I resemble Doctor Tommy Oliver, the Black Dino Ranger.
By the time I land, a new build of Photosmith 2.0 will be ready to install on my iPad.
Bring it on, I say.
Here’s the thing, you see: every hour we spend on Photosmith 2, into the wee small hours of the week-night, is going to save our users a few seconds of time, a few calories of effort, and bring them closer to smiling — just a bit. It’s worth it.
It’s not just altruism, either: my camera hasn’t been sitting idle during the months I’ve been on the Photosmith team, and like so many among our target audience I have a substantial passel of photos sitting unsorted in my Lightroom catalog.
When we’re done, I can brew a pot of tea and sync all of them to my iPad with the awesome tech the Chrises have developed, then rate and sort them from the comfort of my sofa with the simple, elegant UI we’ve worked on all these months. That’ll be a nice way to relax after that hard work.
And then, in all likelihood, I’ll find some obscure little thing I never before thought about doing, which requires four frustrating taps to do. My photos will linger in half-sorted limbo, while I check if Morse and Horne are online so we can brainstorm about improvements.
Bring it on.
January 29, 2012
[This post is part of our ongoing series introducing Photosmith 2 (free update for all users)]
Let’s face it – keywording is a big deal. In fact, it’s a major reason that most of you use our app. And the current implementation of Keywords is horribly inadequate for the task.
For Photosmith 2 we have completely redesigned keywording and it’s the third headline feature (joined by batch-tagging and two-way sync). Truth is, this blog post was originally scheduled for 12 days ago but had to be delayed to fix a few holes we identified in our big design review weekend back in January. But, we’re extremely happy to present it to you now! And again, if we’ve done our jobs right, you should look at this and say, “What? Is that all? That’s so obvious…” If you do, then we nailed it because wrapped up in this simple design is the ability to do every practical thing you could want to do with keywords on your iPad.
[Please note: None of these graphics are final – they are mostly programmer fill-ins. We'll swap in the final graphics as the exact positioning is finalized. But the functionality presented is live.]
Keywords and Batch Tagging
First up, we planned for batch-tagging from the beginning. If you select multiple photos in the Grid view you can see a list of all the keywords you have applied and the ones that only exist on some images are indicated with an asterick. This list updates instantly as you add and remove selected photos (and Smart Groups makes selecting your batches so quick and easy).
If you change your filter options to include or exclude more or fewer photos everything updates again tracking right along with you. This includes remembering your now filtered but previously made selections.
The entire workflow of Photosmith is built to make it as fast as possible for you to select groups of photos, act on them, and move on the to the next batch. So how do you apply keywords?
Applying Keywords
The top-left area contains all of the keywords currently applied to the selected images as the familiar little “pills” like in Mail and other Apple apps. You can select them and copy, paste, delete, etc. or you can add new keywords.
Below that area and also to the right are columns of your existing keywords. There are beautiful visual indicators showing if the keyword is already applied and the keyword’s full ancestry is listed right below if you use a hierarchy.
Any keyword can drill down –even if it doesn’t already have children– enabling you to create keywords at any level in the hiearchy you want.
Don’t like typing on iPad, prefer to tap? No problem!
The default list shows you all of your existing keywords in a scrollable list in the left column and you have one-tap access to your most recently and frequently used keywords in the right column (drill down there too if necessary).
Don’t like swiping over and over, prefer to type? No problem!
At the top of the right column is a simple search box. It does live matching against your entire keyword collection as you type.
And guess what? We remember which method you used last and go back there automatically. It’s a simple thing, really, but it saves you an extra button tap and an animation and that time adds up fast. This is about pure speed: If Lightroom is an image operating room, Photosmith is the mass-injury triage station. Sort’em and save’em!
Fast Access to Common Needs
Delete – So what happens if you have that pesky keyword still laying around that was supposed to be deleted ages ago? Swipe left and delete it just like any other good little iOS app! And you can still purge all unused keywords from the Dashboard sidebar (future post) or really rework your collection using Lightroom, don’t worry, we’ll sync up the changes.
What about when you’ve got the right keywords on some existing images and you just need to sync them up with another one? Tap that keyword pill and out pops a convienent edit menu.
- Remove – disassociates this keyword from the selected images (doesn’t permanently delete it from your catalog)
- Copy – put the keyword in the system clipboard, you can paste it into the keywords search box, the filter bar (yup!), or anywhere else on your iPad.
- Paste – keywords previously copied. (if you copied plain text from somewhere else you’ll get search matches if there’s more than one possible match)
- Apply to All – Applies this keyword to all of the selected photos. This makes it easy to sync up images when you want and not risk messing things up when you don’t. (Only applies to keywords with the asterisk “*” which indicates that not all of the selected images have this keyword applied).
Search or Create – typing into the search box allows you to easily find all of the keywords that match as well as where they are in the tree.
You can tap on a match or with a single tap on the keyword in the create section automatically create it (at whatever level you are at in the hierarchy) and apply it to the selected photos.
[Sorry keyboardaphobes, we haven’t figured out a way to create a new keyword without at least some typing unless you want to go down this route (theonion.com).]
And what of contemplative keywording?
Yup, we’ve got that covered too.
You can review and zoom your full image in Loupe view in case you need to really see the image and inspect it before applying keywords. In Loupe view, you can see right through the 2nd column keyword drawer to your image so nothing gets obscured.
Need to work through your images quickly? Just swipe from image to image. The drawer stays open and the keywords update automatically. Since you’re usually working on images in similar batches the Recent and Popular lists are probably going to be pretty handy during this exercise.
Wrapping it all up
Keywording is a surprising hard nut to crack. By its very nature it’s boring, monotonous and complicated. (If you don’t believe us, we once received a customer’s keyword list that had over 27,000 entries organized by biological classifications and eveything else). There are sometimes strict rules and hierarchy or (for everybody else) thousands jammed all together at the root. Typing on the iPad isn’t much fun but endless scrolling isn’t either. And finally, the keyboard and a couple of lists take up over 3/4ths of the screen space so making efficient use of every pixel of space is crucial.
Unlike some of the other features in Photosmith 2, we’re not going to claim anything revolutionary here. And we won’t go so far as to say it makes all keywording “fun” but Photosmith on the iPad certainly makes keywording a whole lot more enjoying than sitting hunched over your computer for hours. But, this is something we’re proud to give to you.
Posted in: Current Progress, Design | 5 Comments
November 17, 2011
I’ve long been wanting to get back to Design is more than pretty pictures (still our most read post of all time) and write part 2 but the priority of getting the product out the door has always trumped it. That’s still true today–believe me, we’ve heard the yells for 2.0 loud and clear– but when I ran across this post by Philip Elmer-DeWitt with quotes from Steve Jobs I was blown away. Jobs fundamentally understood product design so well and he continues to teach us even today. Anything I could have hoped to have said he says so much better and more succinctly.
And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. There are certain things you can’t make plastic do. Or glass do. Or factories do. Or robots do.
Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.
And it’s that process that is the magic.
I don’t believe anybody could have said it better. The last year of working on Photosmith has taught us this is true. When I first saw this article linked on Daring Fireball I sent it to Horne and he commented that it was so true but that he probably wouldn’t have agreed with it before we started this project. I don’t think I would have either… we’ve learned so much since then.
I’ll still be writing that Design Part 2 post once we get 2.0 into the later phases. We’ve also got some exciting sneak peaks into 2.0 coming. We haven’t spent all this time for nothing. We are doing at least one new thing that is revolutionary and going to make your life better. The only question is which of the new things is going to be the revolutionary one for you?