Photo "Picks": Accept / Reject labels

[Tracer Bullet]

First -- thanks for the great work on this program. It's really exceptional.

One thing that is lacking for handling photos in my workflow is a built-in ability to label/tag photos as being "accepted" or "rejected" (or "status pending", or no label at all). This is a feature in Digikam that I love. Not all photos can/should be rated as 1-5 stars; for a first pass (or for those who prefer it), simply accepting or rejecting the photos can be best.

In Digikam, they're called "Picks":
https://userbase.kde.org/Digikam/Color_Labels_and_Picks

There's a little detail on the XMP tag here (see the "Pick Label" property):
http://www.exiv2.org/tags-xmp-digiKam.html

In my opinion, such an option should be included among the "Rating & Colour" labels (perhaps with an Alt+# keyboard shortcut). What is the chance of getting such a feature added in the near term? Thanks!

[xnview]

It's not like Tag?

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No, it's different from a Tag. A Tag is a way of temporarily marking pictures so that you can do something with an entire set of selected photos. It doesn't *have* to be temporary (you can set the file list never to be cleared), but it seems to be designed with this sort of use in mind. This is completely analogous to Picasa's "tray".

I am talking instead about a way to pick/label photos -- to label them as "accepted" (you like it), "rejected" (you don't), unlabeled (you haven't looked at it yet), or "status pending" (you're deciding). You've "picked" the ones that are decent, without going into too much detail. "Picks" are different from photo "ratings" (assigning a number between 1 and 5 to indicate quality) and used differently. You might "pick"/accept any picture that's not blurry, or any that you think captures the subject well. But you might choose to rate only those you've accepted (all of them), or even to rate only a very small subset of the accepted photos (say, those that will get 4's and 5's). But just like "rating", photo "picks" would be written to the file's metadata.

One thing I liked about XnView when I first used it was that the ratings assigned in Digikam were recognized by XnViewMP -- so they're using the same or similar XMP keywords to store the same info. In the same way, if this can be done, I'd love to see XnViewMP store "picks" in the file metadata in the same way as Digikam, so they're compatible.

Does this make sense? This is a very important feature to me -- it fits my workflow perfectly. (And, since I used the Pick feature for all my photos in Digikam, I'd need those picks supported in order to transition over to XnViewMP as I'd like to do.) So, I can try to elaborate or try to explain better if it would help. I also have ideas for how to implement this into XnView's existing menus, if interested.

[xnview]

could you send me a file with this metadata?

[Tracer Bullet]

Certainly. Here are some images for which metadata was saved in Digikam. I saved "pick" metadata, as well as rating and color metadata. (You'll notice that the rating info loads correctly in XnView! And the keyboard shortcut is even the same.)

Digikam refers to these three things generally as "labels" (just as XnView does). For reference, here are the kinds of labels Digikam and XnView support and their keyboard shortcuts.

Digikam
Labels: Picks, Color, Rating
Pick: Alt+0,1,2,3 (none, rejected, pending, accepted)
Color: Ctrl+Alt+0,1,2,...,9 (none, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, magenta, gray, black, white)
Rating: Ctrl+0,1,2,3,4,5 (none, 1star, 2star, 3star, 4star, 5star)

XnViewMP
Labels: Color, Rating
Color: Shift+Alt+0,1,2,3,4 (none, red, yellow, green, blue, purple)
Rating: Ctrl+0,1,2,3,4,5 (none, 1star, 2star, 3star, 4star, 5star)

I wouldn't expect the color labels to match between Digikam and XnViewMP, but "picks" could be made to match easily enough, just like Ratings do. Let me know if there's anything else I can provide that would be helpful. (Also, please note that the first image ("Pick 0") may or may not have a metadata field defined, but the others definitely do.)

[FOTerminite]

I currently use two color labels to do this, but acctual reject and accept would be very very nice to have around too.

[JohnFredC]

I like the white flag/black flag approach used in Lightroom.

An very important part of this is filtering and sorting by the "flag" value in the browser.

The indicator needs to distinguish between Accepted/Rejected/Not Determined.

[Tracer Bullet]

I agree... being able to filter on an "accept/reject" label would be critical. I do agree that you can somewhat do "picks" (accepted, pending, rejected, none) using color labels, but there are a few issues with that. For one, it means you have fewer color labels to use for any other purpose. And there is also the sematics -- "orange" conveys no information, but "accepted" does. I would not only have to remember the scheme (and so would anyone with whom I am collaborating, such as my wife), but the metadata in the files would convey no information about whether it was picked or not... and it couldn't in that way be shared with others. Pierre, is this something that might be able to be added to the upcoming 0.75 release?

A few more thoughts, as to how this might work in XnViewMP... As JohnFredC said, filtering by the "pick" or "flag" is a very important part of this. Certainly, the method of filtering would be no different from what is already in place. But where would the additional options go?

In the existing right-click menu, there is a Rating & Colour label sub-menu having 6 options for ratings, 6 options for colors, and all the same options again (with "move to next photo"), for a total of 24 items. One way to reduce this -- and make room for four "picks" (none, rejected, pending, accepted) -- is to have the "move to next photo" be an option that fires only when the user is holding, say, the Alt button. I think this is the simplest and the best option, but there are others.(One possibility is to have a user-specified option as to which of the three (colors, ratings, and picks) would appear in the menu.)

Also, in the View > Filter By menu, another section could be added for the four "picks", which wouldn't change the menu length overly much.

Digikam (and apparently Lightroom, too) uses differently colored flag icons to denote the different picks. This or certainly another choice could be used. If both of these programs have a concept like this, it would seem to be a feature that is generally useful to photographers and would be much appreciated by XnViewMP users.

[foundation]

I too use the lightroom accept/reject as a way to "delete" photos before permanently deleting them. For example I'll reject blurred or out of focus ones but keep them around for a bit to make sure I don't need to composite a piece from that one or try running shake reduction on it to salvage it if that's the only image I have of that subject.

[foundation]

In lightroom the shortcut for reject is x. and there is an option to advance to the next photo, as well as an option to hide rejected views and to show/delete rejected files.

[ruebyi]

I know it's an old thread, but was it ever implented?

[diusonem]

In lightroom the shortcut for reject is x. and there is an option to advance to the next photo, as well as an option to hide rejected views and to show/delete rejected files.

Would love to have this as well. Is there a workaround?

[xnview]

In lightroom the shortcut for reject is x. and there is an option to advance to the next photo, as well as an option to hide rejected views and to show/delete rejected files.

Would love to have this as well. Is there a workaround?

no, so a way to use (none, rejected, pending, accepted) like Rating or color labels?

[user0]

In lightroom the shortcut for reject is x. and there is an option to advance to the next photo, as well as an option to hide rejected views and to show/delete rejected files.

Would love to have this as well. Is there a workaround?

you can use any existing functionality to mimic this behaviour:

• Rating
  eg 2 - Flagged, none - Unflagged 1 - Rejected

• Color label
  w or w/o renaming labels in Settings>Metadata

• Keywords
  eg _Flagged, _Unflagged _Rejected
  
  + assign Shortcuts
  
  and filter files via Catalog filter pane
  (though, it would be helpful if the app had Unrated/Unlabeled filters)

Also worth mentioning that flagging functionality (Lightroom [Flagged/Unflagged/Rejected], XnView [Tagged/Untagged]) stored in the app db only (not in file/sidecar). Adobe Bridge is the only one that saves Rejected as Rating:-1 in file XMP.

[diusonem]

Thing is, as posted here viewtopic.php?f=95&t=44822, I assigned a shortcut to assign a color, but it's not live updating, thus the "deleted" photos will still be there crowding the grid view.