Install Experience and Suggestions

[exterminador]

Hi,

 

I want to share some ideas and experiences while testing Daminion Server.

 

I was able to succesfully install the latest Daminion Server version with Advanced Options as I would like Posgre database to be stored on a different drive than the OS. And after changing the Daminion's service user, I was able to add files using network shares.

 

Some things I found:

 

- When right clicking and selecting "Locate in Explorer" I get "Unable to locate ''", either with pictures or video files, I used paths in the form \\servername\share$\filename.jpg

 

- Cannot open video files by double clicking or choosing "Open with"

 

- When adding picture files, I chose "Add Files", went to the desired folder (\\servername\share$\), pressed Ctrl+A to select al files and clicked on Add, first got an "Object not referenced to an instance or an object" error which stopped the importing process.

 

- After playing with the client for a few (added about 2500 files), the Daminion.exe process is using 200 Mb of RAM, it is not that much but it can maybe be improved. An interesting thing is the memory usage keeps growing (even after after leaving it idle for a couple of minutes), does the client do some background work?

 

Things will make me happy :)

 

- Option to hide the actions bar at the top when viewing pictures in full screen

- Option to remove border from thumbnail view (it seems there is a 2 pixels border by default, 1px white and 1px black)

- Option to change background color from the view pane

- About an 60-70% of my pictures are in portrait form, right now thumbnails in landscape form are the ones setting the width of a column leaving a lot of unused space between the portrait ones:

 

 

I think the option of choosing portrait to be the ones setting the width of the column would do a better job for this scenario, even if landscape thumbnails are smaller:

 

 

- Option to not write tags to files. I'll explain, when writting tags, the file modified date gets updated, which is right, but I do not want files to be modified, I'm OK with having data stored on Daminion's database

 

- Option to choose which attributes to import, i.e. I don't want keywords or categories from pictures to be imported as I will use that field to write other data

 

- Option to use ; instead of commas to separate multivalued keywords, categories, etc.

 

- Option to overlay a small (transparent) icon when picture is rated, that way viewing when hidding thumbnail captions I would know which picture is already rated

 

- Option to choose action when pressing the Enter key (right know it opens the Film Strip view, I would want it to open the Full Screen view instead

 

- Field for "Added Date", right now only the Creation Date is available

 

- When browsing in thumbnail view by pressing the right-left arrows, if you get to the end of current page and you want to continue, you have to change the page, it will be useful if by pressing the right arrow when having the last item of the page selected, you get to the first item of the next page, and visceversa.

 

- The rendering method shows the picture after fully rendering it, it feels kind of slow for big pictures on my machine (not a very fast one btw). Maybe using a rendering method that shows the picture as it is being redered will give the impression of lower response time.

 

Features I cannot wait for :)

 

- Monitor folders

 

- The preferences panel (I'm pretty sure some of the options I just mentioned are in the way of being there :))

 

Wanted to say that performance has impressed me in a great way, I'm using a 3-years old computer through remote desktop and if feels pretty responsive.

 

Thanks!

[pgrondin]

- When right clicking and selecting "Locate in Explorer" I get "Unable to locate ''", either with pictures or video files, I used paths in the form \\servername\share$\filename.jpg

 

Refer to : Comment by Murat Yesterday

 

- Cannot open video files by double clicking or choosing "Open with"

 

Behaviour confirmed on my system.

 

Very strange, I can open video in either way from a standard catalog but not from a shared catalog.

[franky68]

Hello,

 

- When right clicking and selecting "Locate in Explorer" I get "Unable to locate ''", either with pictures or video files, I used paths in the form \\servername\share$\filename.jpg

 

I also can confirm this.

 

I think the option of choosing portrait to be the ones setting the width of the column would do a better job for this scenario, even if landscape thumbnails are smaller:

 

I believe the better way actually depends on the relation of portrait vs. landscape images. For some reason I mostly end up with portrait orientation in my shootings as well but I can imagion landscape photographers would prefer the way it is currently handled. The smartest way to deal with this would probably be to calculate the relation and if there are more portrait images to be shown the width is taken from the portrait images - otherwise the landscapes are setting the width.

 

- Option to not write tags to files. I'll explain, when writting tags, the file modified date gets updated, which is right, but I do not want files to be modified, I'm OK with having data stored on Daminion's database

 

I absolutely second this request. Its really important to give the user more control about the syncing process for lots of reasons. What youre saying is just another... I believe the user should be able to choose in which direction(s) the syncing takes place or that there is no automatic syncing at all and he has the option to manually sync the data in either direction.

 

To make it really perfect there would be an option to optionally use (xml) sidecar files for the metadata instead of the actual files.

 

- Option to choose which attributes to import, i.e. I don't want keywords or categories from pictures to be imported as I will use that field to write other data

 

This is basicly the same. Probably everyone would agree that EXIF data needs to be imported when the image is imported into the database. But further data should only be imported if the user wants this.

 

- Option to overlay a small (transparent) icon when picture is rated, that way viewing when hidding thumbnail captions I would know which picture is already rated

 

...ideally a small circle showing the rating.

 

- Option to choose action when pressing the Enter key (right know it opens the Film Strip view, I would want it to open the Full Screen view instead

 

Thanks! Using the filmstripe instead of the fullscreen view is really irritating. Probably most users are used to go into fullscreen view from other applications.

 

- The rendering method shows the picture after fully rendering it, it feels kind of slow for big pictures on my machine (not a very fast one btw). Maybe using a rendering method that shows the picture as it is being redered will give the impression of lower response time.

 

Oh, pretty please!!!

 

Right now Daminion feels soo slow when displaying images. I am on a medium fast computer (Q9550) and Daminion takes about 3 seconds to display the JPEG from a NEF. ViewNX on the other hand takes about 1 second. As said, this is for displaying the JPEG, not the NEF which I could understand if VNX would be faster. When browsing images over a network the difference is even much bigger.

 

I am not sure how much the speed can be improved but at least displaying the image while its rendered would give a faster impression.

[Murat]

- Cannot open video files by double clicking or choosing "Open with"

 

This feature will be improved. We don't decided yet how to pass Video from server to client. Probably we'll translate video as stream... And play it with a built-in player or a system player.

 

- When adding picture files, I chose "Add Files", went to the desired folder (\\servername\share$\), pressed Ctrl+A to select al files and clicked on Add, first got an "Object not referenced to an instance or an object" error which stopped the importing process.

 

Daminion Server Service should be launched with user rights that have permissions to access to: \\servername\share$\

 

- Option to not write tags to files. I'll explain, when writting tags, the file modified date gets updated, which is right, but I do not want files to be modified, I'm OK with having data stored on Daminion's database

 

You can turn off metadata syncing. It save his state permanently now.

 

 

- Option to use ; instead of commas to separate multivalued keywords, categories, etc.

 

Where?

[Murat]

To make it really perfect there would be an option to optionally use (xml) sidecar files for the metadata instead of the actual files.

 

Daminion extract info from sidecar files during importation.

 

 

Right now Daminion feels soo slow when displaying images. I am on a medium fast computer (Q9550) and Daminion takes about 3 seconds to display the JPEG from a NEF. ViewNX on the other hand takes about 1 second. As said, this is for displaying the JPEG, not the NEF which

I could understand if VNX would be faster. When browsing images over a network the difference is even much bigger.

 

I am not sure how much the speed can be improved but at least displaying the image while its rendered would give a faster impression.

 

I've checked ViewNX - it loads the low res JPEG preview and then update it with the high-res version.

[franky68]

Daminion extract info from sidecar files during importation.

 

I was talking abut the export. That way users who don't want to have their images touched still could have metadata in a file. This is sometimes desirable for backup or moving images etc.

 

 

I've checked ViewNX - it loads the low res JPEG preview and then update it with the high-res version.

 

Yes, I know. The 1 sec was already for the highres preview tho. Maybe the lowres preview would be a strategy for daminion too?

[pgrondin]

On the issue of portrait VS Landscape:

 

Daminion now uses a square area to display either portrait or Landscape images. I tried using the proportion setting to select only portrait or only landscape. The square area allotment remains in both cases. Daminion could perhaps eliminate the boundaries under these conditions to display more images on screen.

 

When the screen contains both landscape, and portrait images, I strongly support the current square area allotment. I, for one, would find it very annoying to have the thumbnail sizes change based on which predominates, and would never choose to have some large thumbnails and some smaller thumbnails on one screen.

[franky68]

Sorry, I misunderstood Exterminador's post in that regard. I assumed he would be talking about the "compare" screen. Here it would make sense to optimize the screen estate to minimize borders.

 

For the thumbnail view of course this would only be annoying and it should have a fixed orientation. So here I am with the current square view as well.

[exterminador]

Hi Murat,

 

This feature will be improved. We don't decided yet how to pass Video from server to client. Probably we'll translate video as stream... And play it with a built-in player or a system player.

 

That would be great, I think the option to choose to play video files with the registered player on Windows will be important as an embedded player can be not as flexible as a dedicated application (i.e. MPC-HC)

 

Daminion Server Service should be launched with user rights that have permissions to access to: \\servername\share$\

 

 

In this case service was lauched with full rights over the network share. If I selected only part of the files on the folder to add it worked fine, cannot recall if it worked at the end by selecting all the files on that folder.

 

You can turn off metadata syncing. It save his state permanently now.

 

Sorry, cannot find the option to turn it off, can you please point me into the right direction for it?

 

 

Where?

 

This is about the comment: - Option to use ; instead of commas to separate multivalued keywords, categories, etc.

 

In the properties panel, when entering values, for instance, keywords, if you enter "This is a text, this is the continued text", it will create two keywords:

 

Keyword 1: "This is a text"

Keyword 2: "this is the continued text"

 

instead of a single keyword with the whole string with a comma in the middle. I know this is not a great text example but you get the idea, commas can be more common than colons (;) for some description scenarios.

 

Thanks!

[exterminador]

On the issue of portrait VS Landscape:

 

Daminion now uses a square area to display either portrait or Landscape images. I tried using the proportion setting to select only portrait or only landscape. The square area allotment remains in both cases. Daminion could perhaps eliminate the boundaries under these conditions to display more images on screen.

 

When the screen contains both landscape, and portrait images, I strongly support the current square area allotment. I, for one, would find it very annoying to have the thumbnail sizes change based on which predominates, and would never choose to have some large thumbnails and some smaller thumbnails on one screen.

 

 

Thanks for your comments PG36 and Franky68,

 

I agree reducing thumbnail sizes for landscape pictures can be a downfall on the suggested scenario, but you get less unused space, which is valuable when working with small screen sizes. Anyway, I'm sure that would not be the choice for everyone, so my suggestion is more around giving the option to choose, whether to use the landscape/portrait picture's width as the prefered width for the column in the canvas.