"Free form" view in DEVONthink?

I’m a video editor and videographer and use Premiere and other Adobe software to get my work done. I realized that there was a really cool feature in Premiere that would be amazing to see in DEVONthink in the future at some point. In Premiere it’s called “Free Form View” – here’s a video of it in action.

I’m sure you already see where I’m going with this, but I’d love to have certain groups within my database that I can set the default view to “Free Form” so that I could drag icon previews and place them where I’d like, resize them, choose to have certain bits of metadata visible like comments or tags, etc. etc. I know this is similar to “as Icons” view, but without being able to at least turn off snapping, I think Free Form view would give an interesting new way to look at your data. I’m mostly thinking of it as a way to manage project mood or inspiration boards, brand assets, and other things I work on frequently to visually inspire myself and drive my decisions and creativity.

I concede that DEVONthink is not a mood board app, nor is it first designed to be a tool used by people working in the filmmaking, design, animation, etc. industries (other than managing documents for those projects, of course!). There are apps out there that handle this kind of thing, but I was just thinking it’d be cool to have it all in one app. :slight_smile:

That’s funny because I was just thinking today that I wish DT3 had this ability.

That thought made me take a look at Curio (which I think has it) but the app just didn’t seem to come up to DT3’s level — apart from that feature.

So, +1 for that suggestion from me :slightly_smiling_face:

Do consider the added requirement of having to store (and restore) the size and positions of items in such a view. Now consider having thousands of files to track those attributes for. :thinking:

It certainly wouldn’t be a simple subclassing of the Icon view.

Oh, I’m sure it’s not as straightforward as it may seem. But it would be awesome to have regardless. :slight_smile: Maybe some day… :wink:

It’s always a definite “No” if you don’t ask :slight_smile:

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