Web Viewer Interface: Keyboard and Touch

[tmcgill]

A few questions / issues regarding the IMA Web Viewer interface:

1) I stumbled upon the fact that hitting the 'L' key will "like" or "unlike" an image. This doesn't seem to be documented in the help. Assuming it's actually not there, and not just me overlooking a paragraph somewhere, that might be worth adding along with the rating and label shortcut keys.

2) The viewer makes what I think is a mistake in choosing large to scale the image shown. The issue is that if the "dashboard" is visible, it appears in front of the image instead of above it, obscuring part of the picture. So to look at full images, you have to keep hiding the dashboard. I think it might be sensible either always to scale the image to leave room for the dropdown dashboard, or else to scale it slightly smaller when the dashboard is shown in order to maintain view of the entire photo. This scaling issue is even worse on a mobile device-- there it isn't just the dashboard that obscures the image, even the menu area above the dashboard sits in front of the photo, so there is literally no way to see the entire image without a bar in front of part of it if it is one whose aspect ratio results in it reaching all the way to the top of the screen.

3) I brought some of this up way back in January, at which point IMatch 2020 was the development priority, but would love to see it looked at: using IMA with a mobile device has a few problematic quirks that interfere with usability. Or, I should say, a single quirk that interferes with multiple things. Mainly the issue is that tapping does not work the same as clicking on a computer interface.

• First, tapping on a control in the dashboard doesn't just activate that control, it also seems to pass the "click" on to the image below it, making it zoom in or out.
• Second, for a user without permission to make changes, the dashboard buttons (stars, pins, etc., other than "like") do absolutely nothing when clicked on a computer. This much is correct. But if they are tapped with a finger, they light up as if you have set the pin or whatever (and the zoom happens as already mentioned), making it look like you have just set a rating or collection setting even though (presumably) you have not.
• Finally, zoom behavior is a little odd. As mentioned already, tapping on top of a dashboard control will cause a zoom to occur. But anywhere else in the image, it requires a double-tap to zoom in or out.

Thanks for your attention to these. Just finally getting back around to my hoped-for goal that I had set aside for a while some months ago, which is to be able to go beyond using IMA for viewing and use it for part of my image processing workflow-- would be awfully nice to be able to sit with my iPad and quickly swipe through a set of photos, rating and culling and adding some labels without having to be sitting at my desk.

[Mario]

Please include information about which browser you use and the platform.
Swiping, touching and tap handling is often browser-dependent and can be a nightmare to handle properly across all platforms, especially on Apple devices with their proprietary Safari browser engine.