auto suggest for attributes?

[kkiel]

Dear all,
I use very long attribute lists (tables) to automatically add biological metadata in several languages to an image. This means I have to scroll through thousands of attribute entries alphabetically to find the one I need. It scrolls fast but I wonder if there a way to just type the first letters and IMatch jumps to that part of the long attribute list so I can chose the right attribute row?
Thank you very much for your help,

kkiel

[Mario]

Just to make sure I understand, you are using Attributes to store thousands of global entries?

The Attribute panel has no search function because users typically have less than 3 entries per file (if any) and no search function is needed. And only few users work with global Attributes and usually have less than 100 or so entries (if memory serves, I did not look into this part of telemetry for a while).

How do you use this to add metadata in several languages? What is your workflow?

Maybe this feature I will include in IMatch 2023 will be helpful to you?

https://www.photools.com/community/index.php/topic,12956.0.html

[kkiel]

Hi Mario,
thanks for your reply! I store thousands of entries in global attribute sets (like species information as in 'Rosa canina | Hundsrose | dog rose | rosier des chiens | ...'), then chose mostly one of them in a file based attribute set. This this allows a clean separation of languages and other information. Is there a better way?

I'm looking forward to IMatch 2023!

Regards, kkiel

[Mario]

The drop-down shown in rows in the Attributes Panel for references does not support any free-text find function.
If you open click into or focus a reference input field and type a character or digit, the list scrolls down to the first row which starts with the typed character (standard Windows function for drop-down controls). If your reference is a text and you press <M>, the list scrolls to the first entry starting with M.

This is usually more than sufficient, since users who use global sets use only a few or a couple of dozen entries for references. If at all.

Adding a search functionality that allows for searching in the list of reference attributes would be doable, but given the intrinsic complexity of the 3rd party grid control I use for the Attributes Panel I would estimate at least a day or two for such a feature...

Somehow link in the "find" function (keeping in mind that users may have multiple reference attributes linked to a file attribute set), showing some sort of dialog with a searchable list of available reference values, help system updates etc.

Doable, but quite some lot of work.
Not many users use Attributes and of these users only a few use global sets and of these a very small group (maybe just you) has more than a few or few dozen reference attribute values.

I suggest you open a feature request and we'll see how many users would find such a functionality helpful.

[kkiel]

Hi Mario,

thanks for your answer! I'll do with the scroll function! But I wonder why this feature isn't used more often, I find it one of IMatch mightiest. It works reliable even with several thousands of entries in a global attribute set, and it avoids to (mis)use IPTC-/xml-fields to store metadata in several languages.
Thanks for providing IMatch!

Regards,
kkiel

[Mario]

Some XMP tags support multiple languages - in theory.
Unfortunately, not many applications out there handle this, and often the multi-language tags are stripped when images are re-saved. This is why I have disabled this in IMatch for now. Not many users need multi-language data anyhow.

[Jingo]

I could look into modifying the APP I created for you (https://www.photools.com/community/index.php/topic,9402.0.html) (or just create another) to load the attributes for the selected image, list all the attributes defined and allow for a search through the attribute list.  Thoughts?