Sort Profiles

[fincire]

How do the Sort Profiles "Similar Images" and "Similarity" relate to one another? Switching between them causes Imatch to reorganize thumbnails, so clearly both profiles work as intended. I'm just curious about the difference between the two. Is one profile more suitable than the other for certain needs?

[Mario]

Similarity just sorts by the similarity value determined by whatever operation you have used for producing the contents of the file window. For example, when you run a Search menu > Search for... this will produce a similarity value. Like "visually similar images" or "sketch match". If you don't sort the result by similarity (but for like "file size" or "file name"), the best matches won't show at the top. You usually use this sort profile in Result Windows.

The special Similar Shapes and Colors sort attribute used by the Similar Images sort profile enables you to sort File Windows by whatever similarity IMatch determines. Sort files in a folder by similarity or sort files in a category by similarity.

See Sorting By Visual Similarity for all the details.

[fincire]

Ah, I see, so just changing the Sort Profile in the default window maybe rearranges some items, but it's not really giving Imatch a guideline for what kind of similarity it should be evaluating, is that correct? Thus if I wanted Imatch to sort a bunch of images roughly by, say, the color of the background, I'd do a Similar Shapes & Colors search and change the Sort Profile in the results window?

I assume the "Similar Faces" profile won't do much of anything unless face recognition is on, and Imatch has some face annotations to work with?

Aside from my curiosity, the reason I ask is that I'm trying to figure out a good way to very quickly sort big batches of images into broad groups. For example, I'll get a package of 400-600 images all at once, and at a glance you can tell that there's a logical pattern to them: usually anywhere from 2-15 images in a row will be roughly of the same thing, or show the same subjects, or a sequence, or whatever. Right now I just go through and send these sub-groups to manual categories, then review the categories and write something suitable in the Caption tag, like "EXT - Plateau Meadow Near Cliffside - Afternoon" (location scouts take thousands of photos and I'm in the process of cataloguing them). The tricky part is organizing the groups into shared hierarchies -- I may have 250 exteriors, 100 of which are in the meadow. But of those 100 there's 8 at dawn, 14 near a big standing rock, 21 in sequence showing a gondola unloading, etc. etc. etc. I build my category hierarchies as I go and it works well enough, but with the volume of photos I get, I'd love to be able to do this high-level sort really fast.

Thanks for your explanation!

[Mario]

Ah, I see, so just changing the Sort Profile in the default window maybe rearranges some items, but it's not really giving Imatch a guideline for what kind of similarity it should be evaluating, is that correct?

Select a file and do a Search > For Visually Similar images. In the Result Window, you'll see the Similarity as a percentage in the upper-right corner of each thumbnail. If not, switch to the Result Window File Window Layout.
The Default sort profile sorts by Similarity and File Name (Smart). This ensures that it sorts files correctly, whether it is used in a Folder or Category View (where Similarity is always 100%) or in a Result Window, where Similarity is important (depending on how the results were created).

If you perform a search for visually similar images, but then e.g. use a sort profile which sorts by date or file size, visually similar images will show up in random positions.

As for what the special Similar Images sort profile does,  I give you the help to the corresponding help system article again: See Sorting By Visual Similarity for all the details.

I assume the "Similar Faces" profile won't do much of anything unless face recognition is on, and Imatch has some face annotations to work with?

Yes. No face annotations, no face-related features working.

(...) the reason I ask is that I'm trying to figure out a good way to very quickly sort big batches of images into broad groups.

Have you considered using IMatch's AutoTagger? It utilizes cloud-based AI (4 services to chose from) to apply keywords to your files. This automatically sorts your files by keyword in the the @Keywords Category. Very fast, and cheap or even free for most typical non-commercial use-cases.

If you have series of shots, using the Similar Images should be helpful too. Groups similar images together, so you can select and categorize them easier.
Creating a bunch of Favorites allows you to assign files to (one or more) categories with as single click or keyboard shortcut. A good Thesaurus with synonyms and keyword links (Working with Links) saves tons of time when assigning keywords to large quantities of files.