Thanks for your feedback! I was thinking about this in a different direction, coming from the application and with the strong impression it would be extremely useful. This leads to a different model:
With that feature in place, collections would be on top of the filters, meaning that you would be able to view only one collection within the collection paradigm. Something like an additional module/entry/whatever “above” the filters of the collect module to select a collection to view and having only one such an entry. Default is no collection selected. The filters of the collect module would default to AND with the named collection, but OR could be selected to allow to show additional images, maybe for adding to that collection. With OR activated, the collection would no longer be sorted but the default sorting would apply, with the collection’s images having another frame colour to highlight that they are part of the selected collection. With a collection selected, you would have two additional sorting options “collection order” and “reverse collection order”. If a collection is created out of a set of images, the default order would be by date, if pictures are added to an existing collection, a dialog would ask if it should be placed at the beginning or end or between the closest subsequent date pair of the collection (or only the first two options).
I would either not allow dragging images when not in a collection view, or, have a second paradigm for that, ordered grouping. The latter is not thought about carefully enough (at least not by me), so I would start with the first one.
This is of course not an option. I hope my description how things could work together above makes sense .
Just a thought…rather than trying to get a custom collection ordering tool into darktable, how about creating a separate project whose sole purpose is organizing any collection of files into a custom order? Such a tool might be useful for other projects as well, not necessarily just in the photography realm.
What if one day you decide you’d prefer to use RawTherapee or any of the other great apps instead of darktable? Then the tool that got added to darktable won’t be helping you any more!
While I appreciate the idea and would love such a tool, it has its benefits to have everything in one tool in the case of photo asset management. Especially, iterative workflows would benefit from an integrated solution, which better fits my working style. So it’s not an “or”, it’s an “and” .
However, I am not able to implement either of those, so it’s more a “good luck” question .
Drag & Drop within Lighttable would be perfect feature. Ideally with the possibility to rename all pictures afterwards. See this in old Google Picasa:)
Please come back to ticket https://redmine.darktable.org/issues/9641
I thought again about this topic, and the more I think about, I find that it is pretty natural for photographers to wish a feature that allows to sort and combine photos in a way similar to what you would do in an album or printed portfolio.
Therefore, any comment on my thoughts, @houz? What do I miss, where is the gap in my “vision”, besides the requirement that somebody has to implement it?
This might be a dumb suggestion if it’s already available (I’ve never used darktable ), but how about a temporary display order? So you could drag and drop for a quick comparison, but this information is not persisted.
The main problem is a sort order is not stored in the file system, only sorting by name/date/extension. There’s no mechanism for that so it must either be by a particular program (e.g. in the database) or by some other file system meta (a file per directory where sort order has been specified, some meta in each file?). In general it’s horrible and ugly!
A) What about to reuse IDs? Every imported picture has some ID and there is existing sorting based on IDs. So when I drag & move picture left, ID could be changed. Just a suggestion for brainstorming:)
B) Or the simpliest thing (a kind of workaround) could be to implement file RENAME. I could be able to rename to change order using sorting based on NAME.
C) For me is still the best way drag & drop, combined with bulk rename after the final order is set (in old Google Picasa program).
I agree that with dynamic collections it is not possible to implement a meaningful reorder function. Also keep in mind, that in LR (AFAIK) you cannot reorder pictures within a collection either. The only option for reorder pictures is within physical folders (aka not in collections), where obviously an additional attribute is added to the images, which is used later to display pictures in order, but that attribute make sense only within that folder, nowhere else.
Perhaps the easiest and most flexible would be a “sort weight” type of tag, e.g. “sort_weight=1” so you could have multiple “1” (and if they are the same weight, sort them by file name or date or whatever).
Which part would not work and why? Sorry to be persistent but I really want to understand. IMO the problem can be separated:
Named collections
Changing sort order within a named collection
Drag and drop UI
Let’s analyze:
This can already be done by tags, the only additional requirement would be an additional UI element to select a named collection if one wants to work on that collection, plus UI elements to assign and remove images. A named collection can be a tag in a sub namespace of the dt tag namespace.
I outlined an idea how sorting could be implemented, another option would be database-only. UI-wise it would only add another sorting option set “collection” and “reversed collection”.
Drag and drop is not the only option, shift+arrow keys to move images around would be another option.
It might work easily if your organising structure was strictly a tree (like a file system without links), but when you involve shared properties e.g. tags/groups it’s messy from a data point of view. If you had something like ‘sorted collections’ which made that sort order available only when viewing that single collection I guess that could work. It depends a lot on the existing database layout, but parsing linked list within files just sounds like a nightmare.
I’m happy the topic goes on.
I mean, to photographers we are talking about a really, really basic and hyper-important feature of the workflow - at least for anyone going beyond “single-image” mind set; and even if you just plan to set up a basic family album you would wish to visualise images in a certain order, let alone for complex narrative and storytelling purposes.
I am sorry I cannot contribute technically to the issue (programming), but I assure you, thousands of photographers out there would be terrifically thankful is such feature could be one day implemented.
Many thanks in advance for when that day will come.
Traditionally this feature has been handled by DTP software as a separate step. In many ways it does make more sense to order and layout in the document your are creating as the media, size, margins etc might affect your choices.
I have wished for a visual rename tool for a long time. A tool that displays a grid of thumbnails and allows you to order them and then rename the files by adding a prefix number. It should also be able to open a folder with number-prefixed files and allow for reordering and replacing the prefix number.
Geeqie has a similar feature but instead of renaming files it outputs a text file. It’s not as convenient as a rename.
Since darktable has DAM features, and sort of encouraces a RAW centered workflow, I see the use of being able to create ordered collections. The utility both process and output oriented.
Process:
Thinking about your images, planning their display and adjusting settings depending on context and order.
Output:
A new export option that prefixes the filename with a number and perhaps the collection tag.
I don’t agree about the importance. IMHO, something like this would be nice to have but although I work with multiple images/series of images quite often, I simply don’t miss such a feature and probably I would rarely use it. Creating consistent edits of images to be presented in a “story” is the most important task I want to achieve in darktable. Defining the order in which I want to be present the images is simply not in the scope of darktable. When the images will be printed, export order dosen’t matter at all. When I create a book or intent to present them online I create the order in the layout tool or content editor.
Nevertheless, I have a few thoughts for a possible implementation, which would not change the known behavior:
It is obviously difficult to persist an arbitrary order within image collections that result from database query on the fly. I think a possibility to solve this might be to allow the assignment of additional meta data to images – let’s call them collection tags. These collection tags would be key value pairs. The key is selected from the set of available tags as we know them. The value maybe an integer.
Moreover, there is an additional sort option (next to the already existing one) that allows to select a specific collection tag to sort for.
If a collection tag is selected for sorting, any selection of images (as we know them) may be ordered as follows: First those images to which the specified collection tag is assigned. Within in this group the images are ordered by the value that is set to the collection tag specifically for each image. Images with equal value are ordered according to the already existing order selection.
Images that are not assigned to the collection tag are placed behind the images with collection tag according to the order specified in the already existing order selection.
When images are sorted by a collection tag, also a drag and drop interaction may be possible, since the values are numbers, which may be shifted when an image is dragged in front or behind of another tagged image.
Anyway, these thought may be incomplete and I have no idea if this would be worth the effort to implement such a thing.
The same for me. I guess most people sort by date and time for processing. I wonder how to use darktable for presentation of images to others? Yes, there is a slideshow mode and sometimes I used it.
If the extisting tagging features are used this would allow changes with LUA as well. So the feature could be sort by tags and use hierarchical tags like darktable | sorting | number ?
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), but how about a temporary display order? So you could drag and drop for a quick comparison, but this information is not persisted.