Albums View

[twe]

I suggest a new Albums View,  a masonry grid of cover images for albums.

I have worked with Events, but ended up with Categories instead, and Categories View is more like a folder hierarchy...and not very visually presented. For example hundred Categories named ALBUM: Summer 2022, ALBUM: Hiking Highlights 2022, ALBUM: Mountain Tops, ALBUM: Rainbows etc . It's just a tree structure with category names, but would be much better presented in a new Albums View. Albums are for picking out the best and most interesting photos among the many, and group them for presentation.

Like ubacher have requested before, I think the Dashboard view of recent events (tiny clickable thumbnails) is ha hint of what a Albums view could look like, but presented in a new Albums View with large thumbnails for each album. 
(And I would love to create custom cover images for each album)

What I miss in Imatch is a fun and inspiring way of scrolling through my favorite photos grouped by albums, and not restricted to the Events timeline format.   

See the justwatch movie site for popular movies for an example of what an albums view in Imatch could look like, for easy browsing and inspiration. 

[Mario]

This comes up occasionally.

Categories are hierarchical by design, that makes them similar to the folder hierarchy in your file system.
But you control the depth and structure of the category hierarchy freely, which makes it different.

You can make simple albums, one level deep. Or you make hierarchical albums, any number of levels deep.

When I understand your feature request correctly, you want IMatch to make a File Window that looks Netflix, Amazon Prime or the site you mentioned.

The File Window mirrors the category hierarchy, presenting each child category on the level selected with it's thumbnail as a tile. In a large grid. And when you click such al album tile, IMatch drills-down into the category, showing it's child categories against as album tiles? Or when the leaf level is reached, it shows the files in that category?

Currently you can make IMatch show thumbnails for categories (when you assign a thumbnail to a category) and this makes the Category View look more like an Album View. And the File Window in the Gallery layout uses tiles and masonry already to display images.

[twe]

Yes, I have tried thumbnails (XXL) for categories, but that changes the size for all categories, not just for my Albums category, and is not very practical for everyday use, so i turned it off again. Even if I use thumbnails, it is still just a long vertical list of categories.  I find the Photos I need this way, but would like a more "Find your inspiration" approach, for casual browsing.

It would be much better with a dedicated Album View with a nice and inspiring display of Albums, with different sort profiles (newest, most popular etc).    (Just like your Wedding gallery in the reply, but with each photo representing albums would be fantastic)

My Phone and Ipad....have Albums, and Lightroom too. Of course I can export from Imatch and use other software or upload to Online Galleries (like Google Photo Albums, Flickr Albums etc), but since I have 250 000 photos in Imatch and has been a happy user since Imatch 3.5, I prefer to stick to it, and see it evolve. 

[Mario]

but would like a more "Find your inspiration" approach, for casual browsing.

Please provide more details, references, links to web sites, sketches, screen shots, ...
I'm always interested in what users would like to see in IMatch.

It would be much better with a dedicated Album View with a nice and inspiring display of Albums, with different sort profiles (newest, most popular etc).    (Just like your Wedding gallery in the reply, but with each photo representing albums would be fantastic)

What creates these Albums? IMatch? You?  Based on which criteria/data?
Are they based on categories or folders or time ranges or files picked manually by you (like Events are already)?
Note that you can create events from basically anything, and since IMatch 2023 you can pin them at any point on the time line, allowing you to arrange them completely independent from the files they contain.

with different sort profiles (newest, most popular etc).

What is sorted? The albums? The files in the albums? The albums based on the files in the albums?
What would "most popular" be based on? How often you have looked at an image? How often you modified it? The rating?

but with each photo representing albums

I don't understand this sentence. Can you elaborate?


When I would envision such a thing, it would be a new visual presentation of categories.
Basically an addition to the existing Gallery layout.

The user selects e.g. an ALBUM category, which has, say, 20 child categories.
The File Window shows 20 tiles with a thumbnail and name, each representing one of the categories.

Clicking on one of these tiles would show the files in the Gallery layout. Or, when the category has children, the child categories of the category again as tiles.

Instead of clicking in the category tree on the left, you would have to drill-down your category/album hierarchy in the File Window. This might look fancier, but is not really functionally different.

IMatch can already create categories (albums) based on many things. It automatically organizes your files into albums (categories) based on keywords, location, persons shown, date and time, rating, camera data and more.
This makes a very good foundation for albums...?

Or are your your albums a completely new type of entity in IMatch, as an addition to categories, folders, collections, events...?
If so, how would these albums be created and maintained?

I'm looking forward to many answers and ideas from many users.

As a side note, since you mentioned Google Photo (and Apple is no different):

Google etc. create albums from your photos as a secondary use (and justification) for the data they extract from the photos you upload and which they use to to feed their AI and to monetize your data to the maximum.
This is why they maintain Google Photos and similar features - to justify their data harvesting and to get your agreement to process your personal images and data. I would think twice before I upload images of my family and friends to feed the Google AI. In Europe, uploading files to Google is illegal under the GDPR unless you have the explicit permission of each person shown in your images. For very good reasons.

Getting your data into their clouds is a priority for Google, Apple, Adobe, Microsoft.
Because once they have it, they can harvest and analyze it, run their AIs on your photos and data and monetize everything.
And they also try to make it quite difficult and uncomfortable to move your data to other cloud vendors.

Heck, Photoshop now even defaults to storing my photos in the Adobe cloud, with storing my files on my computer and unter my control as a secondary option.

[twe]

Yes, Albums \ Gallery might be a new and fancier view for selected categories.  More like Google Photos library, but done locally in Imatch. 
 
Events might have the same potential, but I did not find it very useful, because of the timeline view and very tiny thumbnails, horisontal scrolling etc. Cumbersome to use. 

Albums like Zoo Fireworks Fjords Greece Hiking Kayaking Skiing Surfing etc could be displayed in a interactive gallery layout. It would be a nice display, inspire to create more albums.

The main goal is to quickly view and rediscover(old) favorite photos from the already maintained Imatch database in a more easy and spontaneous way.  Just a wish. The simplest form is to just use selected categories as criteria for the albums displayed in the Albums View \ Gallery View.  I don't have more details. 

[Mario]

because of the timeline view

Events organize your files along a natural timeline, that's the idea.
Categories allow you to group your files by whatever criteria you like. But the File Window shows them not as tiles, just as hierarchies, using the category as the name of the hierarchy groups and then showing the files.

hhorisontal scrolling etc. Cumbersome to use. 

If IMatch would use tiles for some sort of album you have in mind, there would probable by scrolling too, unless you have only a few albums. Either vertically or horizontally. No way around this in real life.

The main goal is to quickly view and rediscover(old) favorite photos from the already maintained Imatch database in a more easy and spontaneous way.  Just a wish.

I understand your wish for yet another way to look at your files (in addition to folders, categories, collections, the Time Line View, Events and Persons). Something flashy and more visually pleasing. I'm open to such suggestions. But I also have to design, implement and maintain features for many years.

I currently have no real idea how you want to see this implemented. How the Albums are made and managed.

How the quickly view and rediscover old favorite photos aspect works. This puzzles me.

Could this album view organize your files more efficient than categories?
Or is the aspect that the categories are shown with a cover image in the File Window (like your film strip example) what makes them more easily to discover an pleasant for you? Scrolling tiles like in the Netflix user interface for movies instead of using the category tree / folder tree directly?

When creating the Gallery layout for File Windows, I toyed with the Idea of implementing a drill-down mechanism.
You select a folder, and the sub-folders are shown as album tiles.
You select a category and the child categories are shown as album tiles.
Similar to how Netflix or Prime presents movies, Google Photos present the images on your smart phone.
Clicking on a tile drilled down, revealing sub-folders / child categories and files.

This looked similar to the screen shot you included - which looks similar to the File Window Gallery.

And it worked, but was not faster or better to navigate IMHO than just clicking on the category directly or folder directly to reveal its contents.

It also had performance implications. Not sure what Google Photo does with an album that holds 10,000 files, but IMatch needs to deal with folder hierarchies or categories with that number of files. Or just limit "album categories" to a couple of hundred files, which is a possibility of course. And I would definitely not want to implement al album view in anything other than a app-based View like events or File Window Gallery. Too much work to implement it natively.

So I put that idea aside for some later time.
But this approach would probably the most promising approach for the album view you suggest.
It would be an extension to the existing Gallery Layout.
Present sub-elements of the selected element (folder, category, collection, ...) as tiles for drill-down, and files in the same way as they are presented now.

Before I sit down and think about an Album View in addition to the other views we have now, I need to gather a lot more input from users.

[ubacher]

One thing I find absent in Imatch - and which could possibly be called Albums - is a way to store and access
file selection criteria. Think of stored filter settings on steroids.

[Mario]

Stored filters, collections and categories have replaced the stored selections concept we had in IMatch.

Everything you need should be available in form of categories, unless you have very peculiar selection criteria that cannot be handled by either formulas, data-driven categories, the mighty @Variable formula or Events.
And in that case I doubt pretty much that there will be a handful of users who will ever need this.

Feel free to tell me more what you consider "file selection criteria" not already covert and the typical use case for this.
As I said, we had stored selections in IMatch. But stored filters are way more powerful.

From your description, my guess would be that you want a "thing" that is dynamically calculated based on a stored filter (or "selection criteria". Category formulas can handle this usually quite easily, especially considering powerful formulas like @MetadataTag or @Variable.

Feel free (in another FR, not hijacking this one) about your specific requirements and use cases.