Confused regarding stack displays

[tmcgill]

I have finally gotten around (after buying it a while ago) to installing and playing around with IMatch Anywhere. This is going to be very useful, I think, for assorted things.

But I have encountered one oddity I am not sure how to understand.

I have a category called "Favorites" which I assign to some of my favorite jpgs. Currently there are 77 files in that category. However, in IMA I only see 13 of them, with an indication that 64 more are hidden in stacks. I have to hit the "show stacked files" button in order to see my full collection of files.

But I don't really use stacks. None of them are actually part of stacks, and they certainly aren't hidden behind other files that are visible. Many of them are, however, versions...but not of other files that are visible here.

What appears to be happening is a combination of two things. My hypothesis:

1) The default view in IMA (which does not include showing stacked files), runs into trouble when the current filter/search result A) includes a file that is part of a stack but B) does not include the file at the top of the stack. In this case it collapses the stack into...nothing, because the top file isn't visible for this filter set. Nothing is shown for that stack at all. This surprised me, because I was thinking in terms of collapsing and expanding (which would seem a much more common need), not in terms of outright hiding everything that is part of a stack but not the top of a stack (which is a similar-sounding but much less common need, to my thinking). Seems like a lot of searches where anything is different between the top file and other files in the stack (ratings, for instance, or categories) could wind up missing results until the user goes and turns off the stack hiding.

2) IMA treats version sets as if they were stacks. This is different than IMatch itself, which doesn't consider any of these exact same files to be stacked (mostly- see comment below). For instance, if I am looking at exactly the same category in IMatch and click the filter option "Hide stacked files," which by its wording would seem to do the exact same thing as the IMA "Show or hide stacked files" button, IMatch does not hide any of these files. It is only when I hit the "Hide versions" filter in IMatch that I get the same result.

Is this indeed what is happening, or is there something I'm misunderstanding here?

Additional, somewhat tangential comment from above:
IMatch itself has some inconsistency here. Compare:
1) For the "Hide stacked files" filter, the tooltip text is "Hide stacked files (show only stack top and non-stacked files)". This has no effect on whether masters or versions are displayed. So this filter suggests IMatch does not believe master/version relationships constitute "stacks".
2) For the "Show files which are part of a stack" filter, the tooltip text is "Show only files which are part of a stack (top or element)". This one has very odd behavior with version sets- it leaves masters visible but hides all versions. This filter suggests that half of the master/version set (the master) is part of a "stack", but the versions of that master are not part of a stack.
So that's confusing, too, and maybe it is or isn't part of the original (IMA-related) matter described above.

[Mario]

IMatch WebViewer considers version stacks and regular stacks and rolls them into one concept.
I don't recall the details anymore, this implementation is almost one year old. No other comments or bug reports so I guess most users a good with how it works now...

IMatch WebViewer is all about simplicity, hiding complex features and making IMatch databases accessible for all user types, with and without IMatch know-how. I deliberately simplified things to the max, accepting the fact that for some (very few) this will impose some limits or side-effects. But, judging the almost zip bug reports or support requests, IMatch WebViewer "just works". One of my most successful products 

[tmcgill]

Hmm. Okay. I don't think we can safely say most of the real-world use cases for IMA have probably emerged yet in such a short time, but I agree on the general goal of simplicity and wide accessibility, as contrasted with the goal of powerful options as seen in IMatch itself. I love the idea of IMA because I should be able to do things like expose the full organization of our family photo library, with all the benefits of filtering by subject, date, event, rating, and so on, to my wife for her use without having to ask her to learn IMatch and think about things like "databases", which are much more my kind of thing than hers.

However, in this particular case I think this is something that makes it more complex, rather than simpler, because it produces confusing results.

The whole point of versions is that they are, in some way, different from one another. They have different ratings, or sizes/aspect ratios, tags, categories, or other differing characteristics. That means that practically everyone who uses versions would, whether occasionally or all the time, have a reason to be looking at one version without looking at all of them together. For instance, you may filter to show all files flagged as the ones to show your client. Or you want to see all your B&W images, or those cropped to a certain aspect ratio. Or you want to see all your 5-star photos, many of which are versions of 3-star or 4-star masters.

If the default result of "find all 5-star files" hides all the 5-star files that happen to be versions of other files, that is probably not what any user of a simplified interface expects. It then either appears "broken" to them or else requires re-introducing the complexity by explaining why they are missing from the view and why you have to click on this extra button to see them.

As mentioned, I have high hopes for employing IMA in my home environment, to give my wife access to the full family library of photos with an ease of navigation. She wants to find a good shot to send to Snapfish to put on a mug for grandpa? Easy! Just pull up all photos that have the son AND the daughter, maybe filter by rating also or by some event or date, and browse through the options. But because I shoot raw+jpg most of the time, a large percentage of those photos are versions, which means every search she does is going to be missing many of the results she wants to see, unless every time she remembers that lots of stuff will be missing unless she clicks on the "show all versions" button.

So I'd suggest that the most intuitive, simplistic thing is to treat all versions always as in view. Combining stacking and versioning is okay for these purposes, but the key shift would be making it be a stack/unstack button, not a show/hide button. That is, it would be understood that all the images which satisfy the filter conditions are in-scope for the viewer, and none are (from the perspective of the user) actually added to or removed from the view set when you hit that button, they are just moved out of, or into, a pile of stacked images. The result would be that if a secondary version is in view and the master, too, stacking rolls them into one visual element, but if a secondary version is in view while its master is filtered out, stacking doesn't change how that image is displayed, since there is nothing else there belonging in the same stack to pile it up with.

[Mario]

If the default result of "find all 5-star files" hides all the 5-star files that happen to be versions of other files, that is probably not what any user of a simplified interface expects.

If you suppress files which are stacked in the output, they will not show. For none of the available selections. If this happens and you expect that you or your family would be confused, I suggest you enable the option to show stacked files. IMatch WebViewer remembers this setting.

There are always situations where hiding files in stacks may produce unexpected results. This is not different in IMatch, especially when you think about stacks which cross several scropes.

There is a dedicated board for IMA feature requests. I recommend you add an FR that details how you would like to see the stacked files handling changed. If possible explain how you would like to see these additional options implemented in the user interface (consider that screen space is precious and many use IMA on low-res devices or devices with < 1200 pixel width). Add a link to this thread so I can remember in a couple of months when I look into this again.

I'm working on IMA 2.0 currently so this is the right time.

[tmcgill]

IMatch WebViewer remembers this setting.

Well that's helpful, at least. Does it remember it per-browser (e.g., by cookies), or on the server side to apply to whoever the next user is? (The latter is perhaps more helpful for this use case, but does open up the question of what happens when there are two users browsing at the same time. Can one active user change what's visible to the other active user in the middle of a session?)

There are always situations where hiding files in stacks may produce unexpected results. This is not different in IMatch, especially when you think about stacks which cross several scropes.

Indeed, which is why I had the thought that the more intuitive concept would be "stacking" (or similar, such as "combining") stacks and versions rather than "hiding" them. I'll try to find time to get it written up as a feature request. Thanks for your comments.

[Mario]

IMWV stores settings per user and per user / per device. Layout options are stored per user.

[tmcgill]

How does it differentiate users? I've never seen it ask for a username.

[Mario]

Unless you use authentication it uses the Windows user name.