XnView Software

nightflyer wrote:I have written what is the use of number/colour ratings- you may believe or not, but that is how they are used, and commonly considered very useful by people who use them (not only discuss about them).

I'm not arguing that they aren't - simply that they make no sense as currently implemented. One or the other set of ratings just has to be dropped. After all, rating is an inherent attribute, whereas color (and numbers, shapes, etc) is just a means to present it. The most sensible way to have both is just to offer custom color schemes defaulting to your standard one.

nightflyer wrote:I have also written that technically both rating methods are just categories with a bit different operation and presentation. If you see only technical side, there is no reason to create any ratings, because user can create Category "Ratings" and subcategories 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 himself. All you lose is quick-assignment method and presentation in Categories tree and thumbnails.

Well, rating should be exclusive, but categories shouldn't be, so I guess they're not entirely congruent. And even if they were implemented as categories, I would expect them to have specialized UI of their own anyway.

I'm wondering if having checkboxes on category/ratings would be better. That way you can check out only 4/5 images in "nature" and "europe" if you want, the way you can in most systems that combine categories and ratings.

If we do continue with two ratings, let's separate the two menus into

- View > Rating
- View > Colour Label

And showing/hiding of Rating and Colour Label could become independant (one menu item "Show rating" and one menu item "Show colour label").

Last not least there should be a separator in View menu:

...
Stop animation
------------------
Tags
Rating
Colour Label
------------------
Show files in subfolders
...

This way things become a bit clearer, again.

A bit off-topic but still related to this whole discussion:

I find the naming "Colour label" a bit misleading, since there is colour but no label. Isn't the colour label more a colour tag?

Is this just my poor English knowledge or is this also misleading for native speakers?

Currently there are predefined ratings and colour labels.

Rating
- Rating 1
- Rating 2
- Rating 3
- Rating 4
- Rating 5

Colour label
- Important
- Work
- Personal
- To Do
- Later

The labels are o.k. ("Rating 1-5" is not very meaningful), but I think it would be nice if users could rename both predefined Ratings and Colour labels.

helmut wrote: Colour label
- Important
- Work
- Personal
- To Do
- Later

The labels are o.k. ("Rating 1-5" is not very meaningful), but I think it would be nice if users could rename both predefined Ratings and Colour labels.

Currently colour label can be edited in xnview.ini by advanced users

helmut wrote:If we do continue with two ratings, let's separate the two menus into

- View > Rating
- View > Colour Label

And showing/hiding of Rating and Colour Label could become independant (one menu item "Show rating" and one menu item "Show colour label").

Last not least there should be a separator in View menu:

...
Stop animation
------------------
Tags
Rating
Colour Label
------------------
Show files in subfolders
...

This way things become a bit clearer, again.

I still think that splitting the two features into two main menu items "Rating" and "Colour label" is a an important request for the 1.90.

This discussion seems to be primarily about the semantics of categorization.

Just give the user the capability to change the text of ALL of the category/ranking/color labels... let us as users call it Ratings or Rankings or Scores or whatever we want using the same mechanism we use for renaming files...

Problem solved?

John et al,

yepp, it's mainly discussion about naming and grouping - but still pretty important. I strongly agree in making renaming of subcategories possible. But I'm not so sure whether main categories should be renamable. Once renamed the names will no longer match the menu items.

helmut wrote:I find the naming "Colour label" a bit misleading, since there is colour but no label. Isn't the colour label more a colour tag?

Again I vote for "Colour tags" in the menu structure and as default name for the topmost category of colour tags.

After reading the topics to ratings and color labels, i think we should keep them both (before i followed helmuts first point of view to have only one rating/labeling). But besides naming and grouping, there is imho some functionality missing and room for improvement.

The checkboxes in category tree proposed by foxyshadis is a must have feature:

foxyshadis wrote:I'm wondering if having checkboxes on category/ratings would be better. That way you can check out only 4/5 images in "nature" and "europe" if you want, the way you can in most systems that combine categories and ratings.

If i use categories, rating and colour labels (i better like helmut's "colour tags"), i want to choose f.e. all images with rating 1-3, with colour label 'personal' and with category 'family' (including subcategories). If this doesn't work, the rating, labeling and categorising isn't realy attractive to me.

BTW: I didn't find any thread where someone thinks about implementing the well known star-rating (one to five stars) in favour to the now implemented 1 to 5 rating?! Right now, for me it's not obvious if 1 is good or bad (even the colours don't help). I know, that it's a problem with position in thumbnail view, but i think it's easy to understand and to use for all users and should be changed...

helmut wrote:

helmut wrote:I find the naming "Colour label" a bit misleading, since there is colour but no label. Isn't the colour label more a colour tag?

Again I vote for "Colour tags" in the menu structure and as default name for the topmost category of colour tags.

So color label or color tag??

xnview wrote:So color label or color tag??

Color tags.

helmut wrote:

xnview wrote:So color label or color tag??

Color tags.

Everyone agrees with 'Color tags" instead of 'Color label'??

xnview wrote:

helmut wrote:

xnview wrote:So color label or color tag??

Color tags.

Everyone agrees with 'Color tags" instead of 'Color label'??

Sorry, no. I think it looks better not to have identical English words sharing different functions (if it can be avoided). Using just "Label" would be sufficient.

marsh wrote:Sorry, no. I think it looks better not to have identical English words sharing different functions (if it can be avoided). Using just "Label" would be sufficient.

I'm not native speaker, but from what I understand "labels" are texts, whereas a tag is just something you can add to identify something. So I still think that "Colour tag" is the right expression.

Both "Tag" and "label" have problems with name clashes:
"Colour Tag" clashes with normal tags. But "Colour labels" clash with "Thumbnail labels". And the thumbnail's have are coloured filename label depending on the extension - another clash.

helmut wrote: Both "Tag" and "label" have problems with name clashes:
"Colour Tag" clashes with normal tags. But "Colour labels" clash with "Thumbnail labels". And the thumbnail's have are coloured filename label depending on the extension - another clash.

"Tag" could be changed to "Queue" as another way to avoid naming clash.