In an earlier version of DT Personal there was a great (to me at least) feature whereby if I was viewing a group containing images then a tooltip would pop-up when mousing over an image displaying the comments for that image. This was extremely useful to me in analysing relationships between images of artwork as I could quickly scan across images that might be related and instantly view their comments. Now the only way I can do this is with the Info window but it is far clunkier as I have to click on each item to see the comments. Having the comments appear in the tooltip meant I could read the comments when looking directly at the image which I cannot do with the Info window. Is there any chance of having this feature restored even via a preference setting?
You might try this:
- Switch to vertical/horizontal split view
- Select the group of images in the left/upper pane and the images should be visible in the right/lower pane afterwards
- Choose “View > Show Details”
- Resize the thumbnails using the slider in the upper right corner to view as many/little details as necessary
Notes:
- DT uses independent thumbnail sizes for views with and without details.
- Icon views also support “View > Show/Hide Details”
- Column views display similar details in the last column of course
Finally, the comments column (see “View > Columns > …”) can be added to list and three-pane views if you should prefer those views.
Thanks for the suggestions Christian. Unfortunately none of them really work as well as the way the tooltips did originally and which was one of the things that attracted me to DT.
I am doing comparative analysis of archaeological artifacts (mainly pottery and statues). In the old version I could, using Vertical Split view, look at 50 or 100 images at one go, at a reasonable size. Visually, I could identify possible candidates and then check the details for that artifact by moving the mouse over it to check the details in the comments field (date, location etc.). This was very fast and efficient.
Now I only get a tootip if the name is too long to be displayed under the image. Your suggestion of using Show Details doesn’t really work in my situation as there is a large comparative element involved and I need to be sure I’m comparing like with like as there is no point comparing two artifacts that might be visually similar that are separated by 500 years for example. Using Show Details only lets me see 4 images at a time (on a 21" iMac G5). Trying to find similar images out of hundreds or thousands and doing these kind of comparisons when you can only see four of them at a time is next to impossible.
Resizing the icons lets me see about 10 images which is better but not by much only now the comments are never visible since they are the always the last item shown. Any of the icon views seem to only give the same options.
Column view allows me to show the comments all right although it’s quite hard to read a long line of text rather than a small block but in any case I cannot analyse the images since they are way too small.
I could use Aperture for the image analysis but I have large amounts of supporting articles and it was very convenient to have everything in the same place in DT. Aperture does exactly what I need and it’s tooltips display the image caption where I can put the relevant information so I guess that’s the route I’ll have to go. I’m just disappointed that this feature was dropped from DT. In fact I posted about it once before not long after it disppeared although it didn’t receive any replies.
I’m curious as to why the feature was dropped (as a programmer myself) since I would have thought that the overhead wouldn’t have been very high?
Basically for performance reasons and to streamline stuff (same reason why several preferences have been removed in DT Pro 1.1). However, there’s one more alternative coming to my mind: You could open the Info panel and just select the image you’re interested in.
Christian,
psmyth has some very good points here. Would it be that hard to reimplement the Comments feature? … perhaps as a Preference that is by default OFF. psymth’s description of how he used it is powerful and the added functionalityit gives DT I think is worth it – it seems like a small thing to implement again…
psmyth:
I’ve “attached” the Info panel to my view windows and document windows by opening the Info panel, moving it to the right side of my screen and setting it to use the maximum screen height. Likewise, I’ve size my view windows and document windows to just butt up against the Info panel. DT Pro “learns and remembers” these window size and placements.
That makes it convenient to enter notes and/or keywords in the Comment field, or to launch a Path or URL.
See http://homepage.mac.com/WebObjects/FileSharing.woa/wa/default?user=wbdeville&templatefn=FileSharing5.html&xmlfn=TKDocument.5.xml&sitefn=TKSite.2.xml&aff=consumer&cty=US&lang=en and download the “Modified Vertical Split.jpg” image.
On your 21-inch screen you should be able to view a fair number of image icons, along with the Info panel. Select an image and its Comment field is immediately visible.
V1.1.2 will reintroduce comments in tooltips of icon views.