PhotoLab: Improve Search Interactions

Let’s start with a screen capture:

Observations (bullets) and Proposals (arrows)

  • Search was successful, a category was selected, but the preview says “This search has no results”
    → Change text to e.g. “Show images by clicking on the desired line in the dropdown list” and
    → keep the list active until the user selects a line and presses ENTER (or an additional “show” button)
  • When I select e.g. the IPTC line, images will show up, but the list of found images goes away
    → keep the list active until the user selects a line and presses ENTER (or an additional “show” button)
  • No tooltips for the search categories
    → Add tooltips
  • No way to display all images that somehow relate to the search term (like searching for “any” match)
    → add a line with an “any” Icon that, when selected, will display “any” match with the search term

The modifications above allow easier exploring of search results. The current implementation needs a lot of typing, selecting and clicking (to exploe the results) and can therefore be made more user friendly.

Addendum

  • Search can find more things than can be displayed in the dropdown and the list is sorted oddly

    → Group list entries, do not mix color tags with other items
    → make the list extendable to show more entries

BUG

  • The list shows e.g. 90 items with a “other” colour tag,
    but when I select this, DPL says it’s got 909 files.
    → adjust text position to show the full numbers!

Note: The “other” colour tag results from importing images that have been colour tagged in Adobe Lightroom Classic. And While interoperability of colour tags is mostly fine with Capture One, it’s mostly NOT fine with Lightroom still.