Quick questions concerning Special Items and Smart Albums

[KLE-France]

Posting this in General Support because first, I'm curious before maybe posting a suggestion:

In the Catalog Filter:

1) Is there a reason why Special Items is not included in the gear-shaped dropdown menu, where the user can show or hide the various nodes?

2) Is there a reason why Smart Albums cannot be combined with other catalog filters via the AND/OR and Ctrl, Shift and Alt modifiers?

[jkm]

Posting this in General Support because first, I'm curious before maybe posting a suggestion:

In the Catalog Filter:

1) Is there a reason why Special Items is not included in the gear-shaped dropdown menu, where the user can show or hide the various nodes?

2) Is there a reason why Smart Albums cannot be combined with other catalog filters via the AND/OR and Ctrl, Shift and Alt modifiers?

I can speak to Smart Albums...

Smart Albums are very different than everything else in the Catalog Filter. All other nodes are a single property: a particular value in a single database field (they are "atomic", or indivisible). Smart Albums are much more complex. They are essentially a saved search, that can have an arbitrary number of properties, ranged values, substring searches, and booleans. (All of which has implications for both complexity and speed.) Smart Albums can't be combined with anything else, even other Smart Albums. Could it be done? Yes. But there are complications, when you start talking about combining filters with multiple internal logics. When you consider atomic, or single-criterium, filters, they cannot conflict with each other; it is straightforward to combine them in additive and subtractive ways (like Red and 3-star). But because Smart Albums can have multiple, arbitrary criteria, they can conflict with other things you select. A smart filter can exclude Red files, so what happens if you ctrl-combine it or alt-combine it with the Red files node? You have to now allow for things like order, priority, or precedence. It just wasn't implemented because it's adding one more bit of complexity.

The release that first introduced Smart Albums, 1.9.6, was incredibly complicated. It also introduced the comprehensive support for Exiftool metadata, and there were a lot of changes "under the hood" required for that, and there was also an overhaul of the search mechanism with the new grouping and boolean operators. There was a limit to how much we could get done in that release, and then afterwards, well, there are always competing priorities of what needs to be done "next"...

Some things aren't there not because they can't or oughtn't be done, but just because they haven't been done (yet). Same reason the app doesn't really support metadata for videos.

The ability to hide any of the trees in the catalog filter was only done very recently, because someone just finally got around to asking for it, and the app's been in development for 16 years...

Anyway, I hope this sheds some light on it...

So go ahead and post a suggestion. It's just a question of priorities.

Cheers…

[KLE-France]

So go ahead and post a suggestion. It's just a question of priorities.

Cheers…

Done, here and here!