Unless I'm missing something, the only way to hide an auto opened auto hide panel is to click an image thumbnail. It would be helpful to so rehire pans by clicking on their panel icons. This would allow us to have wide panels open from the left or right edges and still be able to close them even when the thumbnails are covered by the expanded panel.
The behavior is implemented by the UI library.
Panels you have set to auto-hide will hide when they loose the input focus - when you click on another panel or window.
I have a lot of sympathy for David's request. I find the difficulty of getting a panel to re-hide to be frustrating, and it would be nice to be able to trigger it directly. However if this is something in the UI toolkit then I suspect that it's going to be difficult to change.
What's so hard in just clicking, for example, the IMatch caption bar?
This should hide your panel just fine.
Trying to break and change the standard behavior of panels would probably be a research project. And it ma break when I update the UI library.
Because I don't find it that easy to trigger quickly and it's slow to hide. It's one of those little annoyances. What I'd like is a hide button. Or speeding up the hide, or both. For example, the LR top, bottom, left, right panels are much faster to autohide, and don't require you to click elsewhere.
I am not proposing a research project leading to a Ph.D. or two, so if that's what's involved then let's drop it.
I did drop this yesterday already. That's why it's already archived. No problem.
I don't get the LR hides panel faster than IMatch hides panels, though. I trust that the UI company implemented this feature based on some assumptions and feedback by the other companies who use it. I don't see a "hide panels faster" switch or anything. Surely I would not need a PhD to drive a few hours or days into the UI library source code to add this feature, but as it has not been implemented or made switchable, it will be hard to change it. I won't follow this any further until more users complain about slowly hiding panels or missing hide buttons for auto-hide panels. You can also just close a panel via the X.